As an advertising partner of Wargaming, we received a letter today that the company founded in Belarus, which produces the games World of Tanks, World of Warplanes and World of Warships, will not advertise in its own country or in Russia from August.

We have been an advertising partner of World of Tanks MMO developer Wargaming for some time, although we have not advertised their games for some time for business reasons. Regardless, we regularly receive all kinds of emails and instructions from them. Today we received such a letter from the company:

“Dear Partner,

2022. as of August 1, the Wargaming affiliate program does not work in Russia and Belarus. So we will no longer accept or pay for traffic from these countries via Wargaming affiliate links.”

This is not a huge, shocking announcement anyway, because Wargaming already announced in February officially to “leave Russia and Belarus.

“We expect to suffer significant losses as a direct result of this decision.”

By the way, they also announced here that their studio in Minsk, Belarus, will be closed. The matter is also interesting because the company was originally founded in Belarus by the Belarusian Victor Kislyi, but only in 2011 did they move their headquarters to Cyprus, Greece. However, it seems that the company’s management (and possibly Kislyi himself, who is still extremely actively involved in all kinds of company affairs) does not sympathize with the Russian invasion at all, because in February 2022, the company’s creative director, Sergey Burkatovsky, was fired because he was a Facebook- in his commentary, he addressed Putin’s war with positive words.

“Sergey is an employee of the company and expressed his personal opinion, which categorically does not correspond to the company’s position. All our employees are now focused on helping our more than 550 colleagues in Kyiv and their families… Sergey’s opinion completely contradicts the position of the company. He is no longer an employee of Wargaming.”

Wargaming is, therefore, quite obviously anti-war, but Victor Kislyi should not be afraid of Putin’s anger and revenge (who already punishes anyone in his own country with prison for calling the war in Russia a war and wants to punish Google with hard billions for not doing so censored the same from his system “on his order”), because the entire company is already in Greece and Kislyi himself lives there as well.

By the way, the Wargaming company has existed since 1998, and their first game was the digital version of the strategy board game De Bellis Antiquitatis. However, the real breakthrough came from the free-to-play MMO tank action game World of Tanks, released in August 2010, which was a huge success and appeared on several console platforms and smartphones in addition to the PC. The company also published two other games, World of Warplanes and World of Warship, but compared to World of Tanks, which is still in operation today, these were no longer the same undivided success.