State of the game and its future

Suzumebachi14 · September 28, 2025, 7:02am

I’m making this topic to regroup all my thoughts and questions about the state of the game and its future, and I think that many people here have the same type of questions in mind. But even I know that these questions will likely never be answered directly. Still, I’m gonna ask anyway.

Is the game on life support or in a “temporary limbo” ?

We already know that most of the resources and staff are allocated to the development of Active Matter. I know that some people wish for this game to not have success because they probably think that if it fails, the resources and staff might be allocated back to Enlisted. I doubt it is that easy, and I personally do not wish such fate to this new game, I just don’t care about it because I am just not interested in it.

But still, once Active Matter will be released and the hype around it will have died down a bit, will some staff and resources be reallocated to Enlisted ?

This year has been a bit short on content to say the least, most players feel that way, me too. I have no problem if it is temporary, but we have no idea if it is the case. The game has a fair amount of players, not as much as War Thunder, for sure, but there is a solid community at least.

But even if there is a fair amount of players, does gaijin consider Enlisted a failure because it hasn’t met their objective in terms of players, and they have decided to pull the plug ?

I have been there since the closed beta, when there was only the Moscow and the Normandy campaigns, I have played a good amount of games and I have done most of the research in the tree: I have finished the japanese tree some time ago, I have nearly finished the german tree, and I am at rank 4 for both the allies and soviet tree. So, it would be nice to know if there will be a bigger amount of content added in each update in the future, because soon, I won’t have much more things to do in the game, apart from waiting for the gambling boxes and the grindy events.

Speaking of updates and near future, will we get new plans for the year to come ?

We didn’t get one this year. I know that some people don’t really like these plans because they think that not everything that is promised won’t be implemented in time, even if I am personally satisfied with this because I feel that the majority of the stuff that was promised in the last plan was implemented, and I know that unplanned technical problems can occur during a one-year period, so I am not too nitpicky about a few things not implemented into the game if the majority is implemented. So, it would be a good thing to give the players this kind of plan for the future, for hyping them up, and to give them confidence in the future of the game.

Because here is the big problem at the moment: we don’t know if we can have faith in the future of the game.

And here, we come back to the question at the beginning of this topic: can we expect more content and features in each update in the future, or has the fate of this game been sealed, and as a result will we only witness a slow death of the game ?

Finally, here is a warning (not a threat, on the contrary) to the devs working on Enlisted, Active Matter and gaijin in general:
I know the fact that these games are free to play can be a handicap for revenue, but new players will come (and stay) only if the game is attractive, gets more content, features, bug fixes, etc… during its lifecycle. There is no easy way to a successful game: War Thunder started small, and constantly got better. I began playing War Thunder in 2012-2013, and look where it is now. There is no easy way to greatness, only constant work and improvements can turn a game into a cashcow.

Because, if gaijin has chosen to abandon Enlisted because it required too much work to make it great, and as a result, attractive to new players, then Active Matter is doomed to know the same fate, because Enlisted and Active Matter have a lot of assets and mechanics in common, and as a result, the same kind of problems and bugs.

_WARHEAD · September 28, 2025, 7:11am

My Enlisted wishlist is short:

create less bugs and fix existing bugs faster
more maps

Kriegerfaust007-live · September 28, 2025, 7:43am

Games you sell players, games you sell investors. How many games have recovered after years of decline. I love enlisted but steam proved its not if but when. Player defined recovery 30 50 percent more player, company 300 to 500 percent.

Valkay · September 28, 2025, 8:45am

If you go to Gaijin job offers, there is no sign of that they would be hiring for Enlisted.
Im very much afraid that we will be stuck with the current content flow for a long time.

I doubt, its likely that many developers in Darkflow got bored of WW2 and wanted to move on to another game so even if Active Matter fails, its not likely the staff would not return.

robihr · September 28, 2025, 10:05am

i blame their marketing for this. most players that come dont really have incentive to stay after first few battles and those who stay are not really incentivized to spend money.

recently i started playing wows for fun with new account just to see new player experience in other f2p games and their marketing had kept me playing. at start i got t6 premium ship+14 days premium account+ 1k doubloons(premium currency). after month of playing overall i got ~2 months premium, 2 premium ships(1 t6 and 1 t7). i can get another premium t6 ship from missions and if i had been lucky i could have gotten another from super containers.

there is also an event that can get you up to 22k doubloons or steel, so for month or two of playing i can get ~25k doubloons

btw here is just doubloon value for comparison

Spoiler

and what do you get in enlisted? nothing. well you can get event squads here and there, but they are not premium ones you get in other games.

you are eased into game first by bots, then by mixed player/bot low tier MM all while getting tutorial about every part of the game. newbies in enlisted get 2-5 protected bot filled matches and then they are thrown to veterans with everything max unlocked. btw how is enlisted tutorial right now? do newbies even know how vital engineers are in the game? probably not, cause snipers are default squad.

also one thing that annoys me in enlisted is lack of any schedule. no event schedule, no update schedule.

here is what wows has

Spoiler

there are events there that require lots of grind, but they dont require you to daily grind like in enlisted. you get 1-5 months to finish event for good prizes. enlisted gets week long events or month long events where you must daily grind otherwise you miss on best rewards.

does wows get hurt by being so generous? not really cause they have loads of stuff you can spend your money on and they incentivize players to learn how to spend doubloons first by giving it to them for free. also they get added benefit of making players invested by increasing their premium assets in the game.

Luvs2spooge · September 28, 2025, 10:13am

Bots that are more intelligent then a retarded three year old child is mine.

I’ll actually add a couple others:

FNAB 43 ROF increased to a base of 600, maxed at 690
2: BAR 1918 to BR2, even if it has it’s ROF dropped to 500 base and 570 maxed.
3: RPK 1943 gets a 25 round magazine and added to the Soviet tech tree.
4: Hotchkiss from BP weapon to Japanese BR2 tech tree

I could add more, but the Dev’s don’t listen anyway, so why waste my time.

Suzumebachi14 · September 28, 2025, 12:56pm

I played WoWs a long time ago. I haven’t played it for years now. I am just not interested in this game anymore, it’s just too arcadey, and with a lot of fictional stuff.

But for the events, I think the actual format is a deliberate choice by gaijin, because the format of event in WT and Enlisted is very similar: grind a shitton of xp in a very small amount of time (2 days generally), rinse and repeat each time the counter is reset, and you just can’t miss a few times or else you’re fucked if you want the big reward.

There are sometimes cool vehicles in the WT events, but the huge grind needed is just too much for me. And I think that Enlisted events are just a soft version of the WT event, so I have the feeling that the actual format will stay for a while.

Suzumebachi14 · September 28, 2025, 1:03pm

The bots are definitely still a big issue, and there is no easy fix to it.

The other things you mentioned after are more secondary in my opinion, but you made a good point with the suggestions to the devs: at least in WT, there is the “Suggestions passed to the devs” every month, so that you can actually see that the devs listen a little bit to the community. In Enlisted, there is nothing of that sort, and we have zero idea if breaking our asses to make detailed suggestions is worth it, or has any impact at all.

robihr · September 28, 2025, 1:25pm

well i played it till ~7 years ago before i quit and gave away my maxed account.

i gave comparison with wows cause it is secondary game to wargaming, like enlisted is to gaijin, it has been on market for longer time (10 years since OBT vs 4-5 years for enlisted) and it still has bigger playerbase than enlisted.

from data that i have, i can see that enlisted attracts loads of new players, just that it cant keep any of them cause of various reasons. new players dont feel “welcome” to the game when they become xp pinata for veterans and veterans are burned out by constant grind and every event missed makes them want to play game less and less. that is why i said enlisted failure is failure of marketing first.

Gatinius_VII · September 28, 2025, 1:47pm

The conclusion from reading the comments is that Enlisted is going to die and the devs just want to exploit it as much as possible before that happens.

You’re basically an idiot if you spend money here.

Gatinius_VII · September 28, 2025, 1:52pm

Screenshot_1

Even with all the controversy and neglect of these games, they still have more players than those “enlisted” on Steam…

It’s not the people’s fault that the developers are useless and the decision-maker is even more so.

Gatinius_VII · September 28, 2025, 1:53pm

By the way, I only replied to your comment because you mentioned it, not for anything else.

JackofSpaidz · September 28, 2025, 2:08pm

whatever marketing department Darkflow had, they stopped working on Enlisted years ago. When was the last time Enlisted had any major sponsored streams or just some Twitch drops?

The “first impression” of Enlisted on new players has always been poor, but is especially bad compared to other currently popular F2P games. New players have almost no incentive to keep playing once they try the game out, that should be fixed. Give them 2 weeks of premium, at least.

From what I remember, it’s not good. The lack of a comprehensive tutorial doesn’t help things, at the very least it needs to be voice acted. Adding in 20 pages of text documentation as a “help” function doesn’t really help any newbies, as the last thing they want to do is click through a bunch of menus to read about the game they want to be playing.

Compare Enlisted’s tutorial to something like Helldivers 2: that game’s tutorial is short, fun, and introduces the player to all core gameplay concepts and then dumps them right into the action, no waiting required. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but Enlisted’s current tutorial is very “bare bones”, to put it politely.

not in the slightest lol, but I do see most newbies being told to use engineers, so that probably helps a bit

This is definitely annoying, and not helpful with keeping players interested when there will be weeks of nothing happening in-game, so player interest drops.

imagine if the devs incentivized players to buy silver and premium account… by being less stingy with it. Genius, right? Too bad Enlisted silver and gold are a non-renewable digital resource, and now there’s barely enough to keep the CMs paid. When was the last time we had gold as an event reward?

Gatinius_VII · September 28, 2025, 2:39pm

I’m sticking with the “ARMA” tutorial, which is an entertaining campaign in which they use you as an example for others while they teach you, exalting the player.

JackofSpaidz · September 28, 2025, 2:50pm

I’ve been around since the early moscow map closed betas as well, and I’d be shocked if we ever got a real answer to that question.

In my opinion, the game has felt like it’s been on life support since right after the merge. The rate of new content slowed dramatically, to say nothing of new maps/campaigns.

We don’t know it to be a fact, but if it looks like it’s been abandoned, talks like it, and walks like it, then it probably has been abandoned. But that’s just my personal opinion.

After several events of the past year including but not limited to the initial Steam launch, paywalled event battlepasses and more recent community related events, I can say that no, I do not have faith in the future of this game.

Suzumebachi14 · September 28, 2025, 7:30pm

So you think that we might get more content once the bulk of the development work of Active Matter has been done ?
I think that this would be one of the best case scenarios, but as we all know, the best case scenarios rarely occur.

WidowMakerUk73-psn · September 28, 2025, 7:57pm

Could these posts please stop, they are not true, if you are bored or burnt out take a break! There are still loads of players, 500k active was recent count.

I play other games but always come back to Enlisted, yes Active Matter will take some attention, Gaijin is a business, not just about Enlisted… people who were there from beta days have seen how much this game has grown, now it’s slowing down, that doesn’t meant it’s dying though.

These the end is nigh posts are tripe, trash, waste of letters on a post…

Enjoy the best most fun varied WW2 shooter if you don’t go to BF6, COD or Pokemon I don’t care, just stop these posts please.

Suzumebachi14 · September 28, 2025, 8:37pm

The problem is, the additon of new content keeps getting slower and slower, and we have zero idea if it will stay that way, or if we will get more content in the future.

Sure, there are around 500k players on a regular basis, but what about player retention ? We know that players, especially the veteran players, obviously won’t stay if there is not much else to do, and I personally take breaks from this game very often, because if I played non-stop like a hardcore fan, I would have already finished to research all the trees.

You might not like these types of posts, but the fact that I have seen so much of these posts already, and the fact that we never got an answer clearly doesn’t gives confidence in the future of the game. And that’s why I also said that I’m gonna post it anyway, even if I know that I will very likely not have an answer neither.

robihr · September 28, 2025, 9:19pm

in what time period? and how many battles do most players in that time period have?

here is some data:
from 15.08.2025- mid day 08.09.2025 enlisted got 511k unique players playing in that time period.

here is player distribution by matches played

Spoiler

# matches_played	number_of_players
1	123380
2	65491
3	41483
4	29597
5	22782
6	18576
7	15167
8	13107
9	11326
10	10023
11	8961
12	8054
13	7077
14	6721
15	6023
16	5548
17	5234
18	4761
19	4451
20	4192
21	3986
22	3603
23	3342
24	3257
25	3069
26	2985
27	2790
28	2701
29	2658
30	2362
31	2298
32	2188
33	2102
34	1997
35	1949
36	1877
37	1840
38	1707
39	1645
40	1605
41	1537
42	1508
43	1429
44	1367
45	1348
46	1317
47	1301
48	1254
49	1170
50	1118
51	1101
52	1045
53	1039
54	1029
55	956
56	920
57	925
58	903
59	794
60	811
61	745
62	752
63	781
64	762
65	721
66	634
67	657
68	617
69	624
70	616
71	585
72	579
73	503
74	501
75	501
76	500
77	484
78	434
79	454
80	384
81	387
82	390
83	362
84	397
85	329
86	366
87	328
88	341
89	299
90	317
91	295
92	282
93	260
94	260
95	289
96	237
97	228
98	264
99	250
100	208
101	215
102	238
103	207
104	191
105	220
106	190
107	161
108	168
109	202
110	184
111	158
112	174
113	148
114	156
115	157
116	157
117	128
118	149
119	133
120	119
121	122
122	110
123	119
124	103
125	108
126	115
127	125
128	126
129	80
130	96
131	91
132	101
133	84
134	78
135	83
136	94
137	82
138	83
139	64
140	62
141	70
142	57
143	74
144	66
145	57
146	64
147	73
148	53
149	63
150	53
151	59
152	44
153	38
154	54
155	54
156	42
157	46
158	52
159	43
160	46
161	43
162	41
163	42
164	42
165	40
166	46
167	40
168	33
169	36
170	27
171	24
172	44
173	31
174	28
175	39
176	30
177	29
178	35
179	38
180	21
181	23
182	26
183	31
184	24
185	39
186	23
187	28
188	27
189	34
190	20
191	22
192	28
193	12
194	15
195	25
196	23
197	19
198	18
199	14
200	16
201	18
202	20
203	16
204	15
205	15
206	25
207	19
208	15
209	17
210	15
211	13
212	9
213	12
214	12
215	16
216	18
217	13
218	11
219	18
220	9
221	9
222	15
223	9
224	16
225	11
226	8
227	10
228	6
229	12
230	9
231	8
232	12
233	8
234	11
235	12
236	5
237	10
238	12
239	10
240	6
241	10
242	7
243	11
244	7
245	4
246	9
247	7
248	10
249	8
250	8
251	9
252	4
253	3
254	7
255	4
256	5
257	6
258	3
259	8
260	8
261	7
262	12
263	6
264	8
265	8
266	3
267	9
268	6
269	6
270	3
271	8
272	7
273	1
274	4
275	5
277	2
278	9
279	2
280	3
281	5
282	2
283	6
284	5
285	6
286	8
287	4
288	3
289	5
290	4
291	1
292	1
293	3
294	6
295	2
296	2
297	6
298	1
299	3
300	2
301	3
302	4
303	4
304	3
305	1
306	5
307	3
308	2
309	2
310	2
311	2
312	2
313	4
314	2
315	2
316	2
318	5
319	4
320	5
321	4
322	3
323	2
324	2
325	1
326	2
327	4
328	6
329	1
330	1
331	2
332	3
333	1
336	2
337	1
338	2
339	1
340	2
341	3
342	4
343	2
346	1
347	1
348	1
349	1
351	2
353	2
354	1
355	4
356	1
357	2
358	1
359	6
360	2
362	1
363	3
364	2
365	1
366	3
367	2
368	1
369	1
370	2
371	3
372	1
373	1
378	1
379	1
380	1
381	2
384	3
385	1
386	2
387	1
388	1
391	1
392	3
396	1
397	2
401	1
402	1
404	2
405	1
407	2
408	1
410	1
412	1
416	1
418	1
421	1
422	1
423	5
424	1
427	1
428	1
430	2
431	1
433	2
436	1
438	1
439	1
443	2
445	1
446	1
447	2
449	1
452	1
455	1
456	2
458	2
460	1
464	1
468	1
469	1
470	1
471	1
472	1
478	1
479	1
482	1
487	1
490	1
491	1
493	1
501	2
503	1
516	1
524	1
527	2
537	1
546	1
547	1
548	1
556	1
563	1
567	1
584	1
606	1
614	1
636	1
645	1
648	1
662	1
685	1
687	1
723	1
735	1
799	1
823	1
841	1
861	1
865	1
922	1
924	1
960	1
978	1
1041	1
1110	1
1236	1
1277	1
1444	1

so out of those 511k “active players”, quarter of them only has 1 match played in 3 and half weeks. another quarter has 1 match per week(or less).

out of that 511k players, only 85-89k unique players have on average 1 or more matches played per day.

btw for comparison you can check concurrent data

in comparison to last year there is quarter less players.

Suzumebachi14 · September 30, 2025, 6:32am

Another thing I thought about is this:
If the devs working on Enlisted want to concentrate their efforts on new maps, mechanics, customization, AI improvements, etc…, they could delegate the creation of new weapons (models, animations and sound) to the devs making Active Matter. Let me explain:
We know that the vehicles in Enlisted come straight from War Thunder (models, animations, customization options, etc…), so the Enlisted devs already have one less thing to do. The same principle could be applied to the weapons if they are made by the Active Matter team: their models, animations and sounds seem to be better than the ones in Enlisted. Given that Active Matter is the same kind of game as Tarkov, most of the weapons in Enlisted could be transferred to Active Matter, because it is an extraction shooter: you find stuff on the map and you extract yourself from the map. The map seems to be located in Russia or another eastern country, so finding WW2 era weapons wouldn’t be unrealistic (just like in Tarkov, you can find WW2 weapons). The explanation for finding most of the WW2 weapons from Enlisted could be: Captured weapons during WW2 from Germany, Italy or even Japan, or lend-lease weapons from WW2 for US weapons.

That way, the vehicle models and mechanics is delegated to WT team, just like it is now, and the weapons models and mechanics could be delegated to Active Matter team, because they could use a big part of the weapons already in Enlisted, and the Enlisted team could then concentrate its efforts on the rest.

I’ll conclude with this saying that probably everyone here already knows:
Work smarter, not harder