Gaijin Entertainment

What does Gaijin Entertainment own?

Gaijin owns the War Thunder franchise, Enlisted, Crossout, Star Conflict, CRSED: Cuisine Royale, War Thunder Mobile, and upcoming titles Active Matter and Aces of Thunder, all self-published.

Is Gaijin Entertainment publicly traded?

No. The company is privately held by founders Anton and Kirill Yudintsev and has never been listed or acquired.

Who founded Gaijin Entertainment?

Brothers Anton and Kirill Yudintsev founded the studio in Moscow in 2002. Anton Yudintsev continues to lead the company.

Where is Gaijin Entertainment headquartered?

The company's global headquarters and main development hub is in Budapest, Hungary, with additional offices in Karlsruhe, Larnaca, Riga, Dubai, and Yerevan.

How many employees does Gaijin have?

Approximately 200 people work across the six offices, a deliberately small team relative to the scale of its flagship game.

Is Gaijin a Russian company?

Gaijin was founded in Russia but relocated its headquarters and revenue operations to Hungary and other EU jurisdictions in the mid-2010s. It operates today as a Hungarian-headquartered European company.

What is Gaijin's revenue?

Not publicly disclosed. The company is private and releases no financials; its War Thunder player scale and full revenue capture suggest a materially profitable operation, but no verified figures exist.

Anton and Kirill Yudintsev founded the studio in Moscow in 2002, at a time when the Russian game industry was small and largely oriented toward contract work. The company's first significant project was the racing game Adrenaline, and through the 2000s it built a reputation on licensed and work-for-hire titles, most notably IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey in 2009, a console adaptation of the storied flight combat series.

The flight game experience shaped the company's direction. Rather than continue as a work-for-hire studio, the Yudintsevs committed to their own product: a free-to-play combat flight MMO that began development around 2011 under the name World of Planes. The title was renamed War Thunder in 2012 to distance it from Wargaming's World of Warplanes, and the closed beta ran through that year.

Open beta launched in November 2013. The game's expansion beyond aviation was the defining decision: Ground Forces added tanks in 2014, naval combat followed, and the combined-arms model emerged that has no direct equivalent elsewhere. War Thunder was also a PlayStation 4 launch title in 2013, making Gaijin the first free-to-play developer to ship at a console launch.

As the game grew, the company physically relocated. Distribution operations moved from Moscow to Budapest around 2015, with development leadership following. The move placed the company inside the European Union, where Hungarian operations grew to dozens of staff and eventually became the stated global headquarters. Offices were added in Karlsruhe for publishing operations, Larnaca in Cyprus, Riga, Dubai, and Yerevan.

War Thunder's commercial trajectory rewarded the patience of live-service development. The game passed 20 million registered players in 2019, 70 million by late 2022, and 75 million by 2024, with a concurrent-player record of more than 250,000 in February 2024. Official release status came in December 2016, but the game functions as a perpetual work in progress with roughly five major updates per year.

The 2020s brought portfolio additions built on the same model: Enlisted as a squad-based World War II shooter, War Thunder Mobile in 2023, and work on new IP including the extraction shooter Active Matter. In 2023 an economy update produced the company's sharpest public backlash, a coordinated player review campaign that forced a reversal and a published revision roadmap, an episode that demonstrated both the community's intensity and the company's willingness to bend to it.

Gaijin's most distinctive recurring controversy is the classified documents problem: on multiple occasions between 2021 and 2024, players leaked restricted technical manuals for real weapons systems, including the Challenger 2 and Leclerc tanks, onto War Thunder forums to settle arguments about vehicle accuracy. Gaijin removes the material, bans the posters, and cooperates with authorities; the leaks recur because the game's credibility pitch is modeling precision.

The May 2023 economy update triggered the largest player revolt in company history: review bombing and a coordinated boycott forced a rollback and a published long-term economy roadmap. The company's Russian founding origin also draws periodic scrutiny given the industry's post-2022 environment, though Gaijin relocated its operations, revenue collection, and corporate presentation to Europe years earlier and is a founding member of the Cyprus game developers association.