I have a friend who has spent 100s of dollars on the game. Its hardcore fans spend alot on it. I have also played it but never spent any money on it.

@devil240z:

100 dollars on what exactly?

No-one has bought the game, it's free to play. It's huge in markets where free to play is huge. Not the US or West/North Europe.

Also it's been a while since we've had crazy conspiracy theories around here, yay.

It's free to play, but I know people who play it/ have played and they liked it a lot. You can spend money on new tanks, upgrades and paint schemes.

New tanks, premium currency, premium ammo, ect. I think high end tanks can cost around $50 each.

If you have a PC just download the game for yourself, its free after all. Its a real game(as you said), it's of a high quality as well.

@alexw00d:

Well people who work for the company, claim "sales" of over 2 million. Maybe its not what it sounds like, but just to clarify they own 10% of a bank with over 20billion in assets. I know its a theory, I'm just trying to get some opinions around here.

Sales of what? It has roughly 75 million activated accounts, with 1.1 million concurrent players. It earns roughly $372 million a year in microtransactions. The CEO of the company is one of the richest people in Belarus, him having stock in a bank isn't weird. He also donated £1million towards an expedition into the Burmese jungle to find buried Spitfires. I'm not saying he's the cleanest man in the world (I've literally no idea) but dude you sound crazy.

Yea, I've never heard but good things but those are 2 die hard fans opinions not mine, but it has always appeared to be a quality product just not one I have to much interest in due to imbalance due to the pay model.

I have played about 6000 battles and spent around eighty bucks to date on the game.

I can certainly see why some people spend big on WoT, to the tune of hundreds of dollars per year. It's a fine title, the microtransaction system is basically for premium accounts - which earn faster progression - and for one-off purchases (things like better ammo, special tanks, camouflage, and game related services like experience conversion).

It's much, much bigger in eastern Europe where tanks are a more identifiable concept to most people (compulsory service is either still ongoing or strong within recent national memory). I also hear it does fairly well in Asia but this is purely anecdotal.

I'm considering closing this poll since World of Tanks can't even be purchased...there are people like me who downloaded it, played a little here and there, but never spent any money. There isn't an option I can even vote for. Polls cannot be edited.

I have played 14k battles in the past 3 years and spend some money on premium subscription. This game is huge in Russia and China and even both European servers have 150k players each during the day with queue times for 15 player matches in around 10 seconds. They are a competent developer that has continued to update their game through these years. Although they need to hire better programmers to optimize it, fps is pretty terrible at times.

There are a lot shadier F2P games than this one.

As others have said it's a f2p game so no one really bought it, just spent money on microtransaction. It's huge where f2p is huge, in countries with a much lower average income compared the the western game prices. It's also highly and I mean HIGHLY popular with school kids who have little to no income. And like every fad with younger kids it spread like wildfire through the schools. As soon as they got the ball rolling they also started advertising like crazy with the money they got, in those same regions or regions they entered. Straight up muscle style giant billboards and LCDs in airport lounges and cinemas type of advertising muscle.

We don't see it much because they didn't target the demographic of the people who visit sites like GB. (so you're not gonna get a useful poll result really) They didn't go for the "hardcore" crowd for the lack of a better term. Like LoL before them (and maybe even more so) they went straight to the fresh blood, the kids who don't play mario anymore, they play f2p games that they can play forever without needing to pay for new games or ask parents for new games. The several people I know who play are all kids of my work colleges or related family members.

In their wake actually sprang up a lot of imitators chasing the same moolah. Stuff like War Thunder, etc..

if anyone wants someone to play with, feel free to add me

Gt: Arc Assassin 4

Yup I've played this game.. it was called "Batman: Arkham Knight". Smh...

The conspiratorial tone of your post made me smile. LIZARDMEN! Is there something informing your suspicion? If you didn't even know the game is F2P/freemium, I have to wonder where your ideas are coming from.

The game itself was pretty damn fun the last time I had a look at it. As it happens, there are many US players though that's not their primary market. They've even acquired some studios in the US, apparently.

Look into it some more if you're interested. I know a lot of people who at least tried that game as I did myself. A few of them are more than full-videogame-price deep into the rabbit hole as well. It's pretty entertaining and worth a look but got grindy as fuck quickly when I played it.That was when there still was straight-up better "premium ammo" though. Upon realizing that, I had a good laugh, found myself some better games and never looked back.

All those systems got massively overhauled since however. It doesn't really look categorically worse now than other ftp-games I tried.