Read this first
Vanguard Digital is paid for this page. If you follow our link and register an account, the advertising network that runs the campaign pays us a fee. Nothing about your registration changes, you are charged nothing extra, and the publisher treats the account exactly as it would any other.
We have no arrangement with a competing title, which means this page is not a comparison and should not be read as one. The affiliate disclosure page explains what that does and does not influence.
What the publisher says the game is
War Thunder is an online multiplayer vehicle combat game created and published by Gaijin Entertainment. It is built around battles fought with aircraft, helicopters, tanks and ships, in a single game rather than as separate products, and it runs as an online service rather than as a campaign you finish.
That description is the publisher's, and it is where our product-specific statements stop. The publisher's own site is at warthunder.com, and it carries the current detail on content, updates and requirements. That is an ordinary link; we are paid nothing if you use it.
Which computers it runs on
The campaign we are part of covers the desktop versions: Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no phone or tablet route through our link, and a reader on a mobile device should not expect to be able to complete the sign-up and play from that device. If you are reading this on a phone, the sensible move is to come back to it at a computer.
What a particular machine needs in order to run it well is a question for the publisher's own system requirements page, which is kept current and which we do not attempt to reproduce. The hardware page here explains how to read those requirements against your own specifications, which is the part that is genuinely general.
What signing up involves
The flow behind our link is the standard one for this category, and the setting up page describes each stage in more detail.
- Register an account on the publisher's page, with a nickname, an email address and a password.
- Confirm the email address from the message sent to it. This is the step that makes the account recoverable later, and it is worth doing straight away.
- Install the game client on a Windows, macOS or Linux computer, from the publisher's own download.
- Log in and start the tutorial, which is where the controls and the game's systems are introduced.
None of it is quick in the sense of being finished in ten minutes. The account takes a couple of minutes, the client download is the long part and will occupy an evening on a typical home connection, and the tutorial is worth taking at its own pace rather than clicking through. Plan for one sitting from registration to a first real match, and do the registration at the computer you intend to play on, so the download can start while you are still sitting there.
Those four steps are also, as it happens, what the advertising campaign is paid for — a registered account that completes the tutorial. We would rather state that plainly than have it discovered. It is the reason this page exists at all, and knowing it is part of reading the page properly.
Visit the War Thunder sign-up page
Paid link. Following it and creating an account earns Vanguard Digital a fee from the advertising network; your registration, and everything after it, is identical either way. The publisher's own site, which earns us nothing, is warthunder.com.
What we cannot tell you
An affiliate site repeating things it has not verified is how bad information spreads. Here is what we leave out, and where each answer actually lives.
| Question | Why we do not answer it | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| What does it cost, and what is in the store? | Prices vary by region and change often; a stale figure would mislead | The publisher's own store and site |
| What classification does it have in Australia? | Classifications can change and are a matter of public record, not our summary | Australian Classification Board |
| Will it run on my specific computer? | We have not tested your hardware and publish no benchmarks | The publisher's system requirements, plus our hardware page |
| How many players does it have, or how good is it? | Popularity claims and review verdicts from a paid site are worth nothing | Independent reviews and player communities |
| What is in the current update? | Patch notes change weekly and are published by the developer | The publisher's news and patch notes |
| Can you help with my account, ban or refund? | We have no access to any account and no relationship with support | The publisher's support desk; for consumer issues, the ACCC |
How our link works, precisely
Transparency about the mechanism is part of the disclosure, so here it is in full. The button above is an ordinary HTML link whose destination is visible in your browser's status bar before you click it. It points at the advertising network's tracking address, which forwards you to the publisher's sign-up page. We do not route it through a redirect on this domain, we do not change the destination with JavaScript, and we do not attach anything about you to it.
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads no third-party script. We cannot tell whether you followed the link; the network reports totals to us, not visitors. The cookie policy states the same thing in the formal register, and the privacy policy covers the ordinary server logs our host keeps.
Using the publisher's site instead
If you would prefer that nobody is paid for your sign-up, go to warthunder.com directly and register there. The account, the client and the game are the same. We would rather say this out loud than have the choice hidden — a disclosure that only appears where it cannot affect anything is not really a disclosure.
Deciding whether the category suits you at all
The more useful question is usually not about this title but about the category. Online vehicle games reward patience, repetition and an interest in the machines themselves. Progress is measured in dozens of hours, matches can be slow, and a sizeable part of skill is knowledge rather than reflex. If that sounds like a chore, no particular title in the category will change it; if it sounds appealing, the modes and jargon page is the most useful preparation for a first evening.
And if you decide against it, nothing on this site needs you to sign up. The other six pages are written to be useful whether or not anyone ever follows our link, which is the standard we would want applied to a site that is paid the way this one is.