Wargaming
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In Soviet Belarus, a game company messed up the history.
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Wargaming Group Limited (also known as Wargaming.net or WG) is a formerly Belarusian video game company headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus. The group operates across more than 20 offices globally and development studios, the largest of which was located in Minsk, where the company originated from. Initially focused on turn-based strategy and real-time strategy games, Wargaming switched to developing free-to-play online action games in 2009, including the military-themed team-based game World of Tanks, and later World of Warships and World of Warplanes.
After the controversy involving the company staff's pro-Russian statement in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wargaming announced the closure of all operations in Russia and Belarus and withdrew from both countries.
Why They and Their Games Should be Bombed
- They milked the most popular games they had created (World of Tanks and World of Warships) to the point that these two aforementioned games are the main sources of the company's income while abandoning other franchises such as Massive Assault.
- They're also partially abandoning World of Warplanes after gaining mixed reception, although World of Warplanes' server is still active, they never released an update to the game for 4 years, the only reason Wargaming revived and overhauled World of Warplanes in 2017 is because of commercial success of Gaijin's MMO military battle game War Thunder.
- To quote the popular moniker "Russian/Soviet bias", Wargaming is infamous for only listening to the feedback from the Russian/CIS fanbases, which led to various changes that made the in-game Soviet-affiliated vehicles much stronger than its contemporaries.
- They spammed their ads about their games as if their games were low-grade MMO games, literally on any kind of website they can think of, ranging from MediaFile, YouTube, FANDOM, 9GAG, to even PornHub.
- Wargaming is responsible for spreading many historical misconceptions and false historical facts on both the internet and in the real world, due to having tons of historically inaccurate content featured in World of Tanks and World of Warships. Despite Wargaming claiming that they had their own "historian teams" to research various tanks/warships projects in the WWII/Early Cold War era, they added several fictional vehicles into the game (some of the most infamous examples are the Jagdpanzer E-100, the VK.72.01, the 59-Patton, the Waffentrager Ausf E-100, and several Japanese super-heavy tanks. But the worst offender is arguably the E-50 Ausf.M medium tank, which never even EXISTED, not even as a blueprint concept), these fictional vehicles' depiction in their game was believed to exist by several fans who had learned (false) history from games they had played. which later caused several toy and model makers to create "historical" model kits based on World of Tanks' fictional tanks.
- They attempted to turn their games (particularly World of Tanks) into a pay-to-win games, such as the inclusion of premium ammunition (also known as Gold Ammo), expensive ammunition with superior stats than regular ammunition that you can buy with the high amount of in-game currency or buy it with premium currency. Or, the proposed (but canceled after massive backlash) Patch 10.0 "Rubicon", which included perks that significantly boost the tank's performance that can only be obtained via getting extremely hard achievements or buying it with real money.
- Since the creation of World of Tanks in 2010, Wargaming released only one non-MMO single-player game; Hybrid Wars, which is notorious for bad quality.
- They usually sell expensive packages of in-game items, encouraging players to buy them by including several premium tanks that can only be obtained by purchasing said packages, packages ranking the price from $50 to $750.
- Since 2016, Wargaming has introduced and exploited the loot boxes system by including an incredibly overpowered vehicle that cannot be obtained by any other means.
- Speaking about item selling, Wargaming and their Chinese partner, Kongzhong Corp managed to sell many ludicrous-priced in-game items in the Chinese server of World of Tanks and World of Warships, the most expensive item in-game sold at a combined price of $2000.
- In an attempt to calm down an angry mainland Chinese player base (which was one of the main sources of income) after many Chinese players were enraged over the sight of the flag of Republic of China (Taiwan) in-game, Wargaming removing various flag of Asian nations featured in the special Asia-Pacific faction in World of Warship, which leads to massive controversy related to discrimination towards other Asia-Pacific nations.
- They showed a hostile reaction against any criticism, the most infamous case being when they threatened to claim a DMCA against YouTuber SirFochYou, who criticized Wargaming's policy.
Redeeming Qualities
- Despite their bad reputation for spreading false historical facts, Wargaming funded several projects to restore and recover WW2II tanks for various museums and also produced short historically accurate documentaries about several vehicles featured in their games.
- Wargaming usually collaborates with several media franchises (including anime ones) as a fanservice, the most well-known collaboration being their World of Tanks collaboration with a Japanese anime series Girls und Panzer, which greatly promoted the then lesser-known anime series into a popular franchise as well as making the series often associated with World of Tanks.