Trap Plan, a marketing firm specializing in video games, has confessed to using fake accounts (a practice called astroturfing) on Reddit. The agency’s CEO publicly claimed success with this tactic while promoting their campaign for the game War Robots: Frontiers.
I was surprised to learn this wasn’t the only game they promoted this way! Some fans actually did some digging and found out they ran similar campaigns for others too.
The Official Announcement
As we previously noted, this information comes straight from the CEO of Trap Plan, Pavel Beresnev. He announced it in a post on the company’s website.
The original blog post is no longer available, but it was saved by the Internet Archive. You can view an archived version in the screenshot and link provided.
According to the blog post, someone deliberately tried to make it seem like regular players were writing the posts. These posts appeared on communities like r/pcmasterrace, r/PlayStation5, r/Mecha, and r/gaming, with the intention of starting natural, unforced conversations about the game.
Pavel Beresnev pointed out that many Redditors unknowingly helped with the campaign. He explained in a blog post that most people participating didn’t even know they were contributing to a marketing effort.
Predictably, the reaction on Reddit to the blog post wasn’t positive. Though many users weren’t totally shocked, a lot of them were upset by what they saw as misleading marketing. It’s frustrating to feel deceived, especially when a company is making money from it.
Pavel Beresnev clarified that the marketing campaign came solely from Trap Plan, not from the developers of War Robots: Frontiers, MY.GAMES. He shared this information in an email to Kotaku.
We wanted to test a genuine approach to promoting games on Reddit, avoiding bots and fake accounts, and document the results as a future example. However, when we published this information on our website, we mistakenly included MY.GAMES and War Robots: Frontiers, which wrongly suggested they were involved in the promotion.
We created this content on our own, without any request or approval from MY.GAMES. We realized it was an error and have taken it down. We deeply apologize to MY.GAMES and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the mix-up and any confusion it caused.
War Robots: Frontiers wasn’t the only game where Trap Plan used these kinds of marketing strategies; they’ve done it with others as well.
War Robots: Frontiers is the Tip of the Iceberg
How Split Fiction, World of Warships, and Other Games Astroturfed Reddit
byu/Forestl inGames
Many other games have run similar campaigns, as noted by user Forestl in the r/Games thread. They compiled examples from posts shared by Pavel Beresnev on LinkedIn.
Here’s a quick list of other games mentioned in these examples:
- Active Matter
- Bee Simulator
- Gloomy Eyes
- Mandragora
- Misery
- Split Fiction
- Tabletop Game Shop Simulator
- War Thunder
- World of Warships
This situation further erodes trust among Reddit users. It’s important to remember this is only a snapshot of recent cases, and Trap Plan is just one example of an agency employing these methods. This raises concerns about how widespread these tactics are within the gaming industry, and even potentially beyond it, into other businesses.
Based on today’s revelations, it seems we may never fully understand the scope of this issue. It’s unusual to hear a marketing CEO openly discuss deceptive practices like astroturfing, but it’s a good reminder for everyone to be skeptical and think critically about information they find online.
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2025-11-11 05:07