Marketing company Trap Plan gets caught boasting about astroturfing Reddit with 100 fake ‘player posts’ for War Robots: Frontiers

Video game marketing company Trap Plan has hastily deleted many of its blog posts, which boasted about the company’s meticulous astroturfing strategy on Reddit, after users on the platform caught wind of its scheme to rake in organic traffic for free-to-play game War Robots: Frontiers, developed by My.Games.

Trap Plan crafted and published an estimated 100 “organic style posts and comments” across numerous subreddits to mimic actual player reviews. The company detailed on its website that one instance of its campaign consisted of over 40 hand-crafted posts, which have now been deleted.

Trap Plan submitted these marketing posts across multiple subreddits, including r/pcmasterrace, r/PlayStation5, r/Mecha, and r/gaming. In a February post, recovered via the Internet Archive, Trap Plan CEO Pavel Beresenev said:

We published over 40 posts across major gaming subreddits… Each post was tailored to the tone and culture of its community. The content varied from short clips and GIFS to ‘I found this game…’ discovery-style posts, screenshot threads, and light discussion prompts about tactical mech combat and movement mechanics.

Beresenev wrote that the team played the game to capture “fresh footage” and create posts that “reflected real gameplay and experience,” all while avoiding the feeling of overt ads.

Beresenev further added, “We avoided direct promotion and focused on native conversion formats. Players discussed the game naturally–asking questions, comparing it to Titanfall and MechWarrior, and sharing opinions about tactical mechanics.”

In a later May 2025 post, the claims became even more lavish, with the firm having “strategically seeded 100 organic-style posts and comments across relevant subreddits.” Users interacted with the posts, not realizing they were part of a marketing campaign.

However, the marketing scheme came to light on r/Games, where users pointed out the earlier posts, resulting in 404 errors on the Trap Plan’s website.

The gaming community is now outraged, with users accusing companies of eroding trust in online communities. Beresenev tried to counter with damage control, denying My.Games and War Robots: Frontiers had anything to do with the campaign. 

He told Kotaku when it reached out for comment:

When publishing the case study on our website, we wrongfully mentioned MY.GAMES and War Robots: Frontiers, which created a misleading impression that these activities were done on their behalf. This was entirely our initiative and not endorsed by MY.GAMES in any way.

In the age of AI-generated or enhanced content, users might already be wary about trusting reviews or comments made on social media, many of which can be coerced, incentivized or manipulated with relative ease as part of marketing campaigns. Finding an executive boasting about this is a rarity however even if they have engaged in damage control since.

It does bring into question the veracity of information available to users on anonymous platforms such as Reddit, where modern AI engines, including Google (which has an agreement with the platform), train on user data, resulting in such 'impressions' influencing far more than just users on the platform in what many could feel is deceptive marketing at the very least.

War Robots: Frontiers has a 63.58% positive review ratio on Steam at the time of writing earning it a 'mixed' recommendation on the storefront, a far cry from the glowing reviews that were placed on Reddit earlier.