I paid $20 to get the steam version as I want to play it on my steamdeck (And I apologize for doing that). Then I learnt that if you played war thunder with your steam account before, you have to contact support to link the account. However, the support communicating with me has not idea how that works so I have to remind him/her why this merging is possible, then it was forwarded to someone else. It has been hours and I haven’t heard anything back.
My account was merged with Steam instantly.
If you ever played war thunder with your steam in the past, there will be no prompt to tell you to merge the gaijin account. A new steam enlisted account will be register instantly.
I played War Thunder only once, maybe month ago and then I uninstalled.
I had 0 issues. My steam account had war thunder on it prior too.