Who Owns War Thunder?

Gaijin Entertainment was founded in 2002 in Moscow by the Yudintsev brothers. The studio's first major project was the racing game Adrenaline, and it built credibility through the 2000s with licensed work including IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey in 2009. The flight game experience fed directly into what became War Thunder.

The project began around 2011 under the working title World of Planes, a name dropped in 2012 to avoid confusion with Wargaming's World of Warplanes. A closed beta ran through 2012, and the open beta launched in November 2013 on PC. Early versions focused on World War II-era aviation across a handful of nations.

Two decisions defined the game's trajectory. The first was expanding beyond aircraft: the 2014 Ground Forces update added tanks, turning War Thunder into a combined-arms simulator, and naval forces followed. The second was console expansion. War Thunder was a PlayStation 4 launch title, making Gaijin the first free-to-play developer to ship a game at a console launch, and Xbox and PlayStation 5 and Series X/S versions followed.

Gaijin relocated west through the mid-2010s. The distribution business moved from Moscow to Budapest around 2015, and development leadership followed. Hungarian tax records show the Hungarian entity growing from 42 employees in January 2022 to 56 by January 2023, part of a roughly 200-person company spread across six offices in Karlsruhe, Larnaca, Budapest, Riga, Dubai, and Yerevan.

War Thunder passed 20 million registered players in 2019, 70 million by late 2022, and more than 75 million by 2024. Concurrent player records kept climbing: the all-time peak exceeded 250,000 simultaneous players in February 2024. The mobile spin-off War Thunder Mobile launched in 2023, and a dedicated VR title, Aces of Thunder, has been in development for PlayStation VR2.

By 2025 the game had accumulated more than 2,500 playable vehicles spanning World War I biplanes to modern jets, tanks, helicopters, and warships, with a cadence of roughly five major updates per year. Gaijin's stated position is that support continues as long as the player base holds, and the player count has grown every year.