An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that's meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.
The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.
The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren't going to like it.
What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:
Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent "was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future," and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.
"This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way," Beresnev said. "We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused."
https://www.trapplan.com/about-us
Trap Plan by The Numbers
We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate
with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok
2023 Trap Plan Founded
$10M+ Sold Games
20+ Clients in 2024