Generally, gaming companies have robust, very well resourced research and design teams. But the gaming industry also benefits from public technical contributions from subject matter experts.

Sometimes, this has involved the unauthorized release of classified information.

So let's start with the enormously popular game series "War Thunder" as an example.

Company background: War Thunder is made by a gaming company called Gaijin Entertainment. Gaijin was founded in Russia in 2002 with distribution out of Moscow. The name, which means "foreigner" in Japanese, was intentionally chosen to appeal to possible Japanese interests and Japanese markets. By 2012, Gaijin had an office in Germany and in 2015 moved its headquarters and distribution to Budapest, Hungary. The company focuses on free-to-play online games. It is reported to have a staff of about 200 employees across offices in 6 countries: Karlsruhe (Germany), Larnaca (Cyprus), Budapest (Hungary), Riga (Latvia), Dubai (UAE) and Yerevan (Armenia).

War Thunder is reported to have more than 6 million registered users.

The software the game runs on is open source software. The basic operational gaming software is called an "engine". Being open source, the engine, called "The Dagor Engine", benefits from programming contributions from users and the general public. In other words, users and the public generally can directly contribute or modify the game's operating code, improving how the game operates and how vehicles in the game perform.

The game also uses a video graphics engine, based on nVidia's "PhysX physics" engine.

The reason these two engines are important is they allow game developers to save development time by not having to write their own code. Their players can do that for them.

It also means that the planes, tanks and warships used in the game can come from the users themselves, or be altered and enhanced by users.

Think of it as a kind "Wiki" game in which the players themselves contribute and improve the vehicles.

This tends to attract people who are very knowledgeable about the tanks, planes and ships in the game, and contribute in real ways improving how those vehicles look and perform in the game. Technical information and research is posted to War Thunder discussion forums. The information is then sometimes used to improve the game's planes, tanks and ships.

The performance of vehicles in the game has become so realistic and accurate, that the game is used by real military forces for training.

US Army tank crews used the game during Covid to maintain their skills (click here).

For example, a Ukrainian Bradley crew publicly credited the game in teaching them how to successfully engage and kill Russian T-90 tanks (click here).

This has caused some trouble. Occasionally, players with access to classified information and data about a favorite vehicle have posted classified information to the forums.

War Thunder players have posted sensitive information about the AIM-120 missile, British Challenger-2 Main Battle Tank (MBT), French Leclerc, Chinese DTC-10215 anti-armor shells, its Type-99 MBT, the Eurocopter attack helicopter and more (click here).

Click here for a report about a classified F-15 Eagle data leak to War Thunder forums.

Click here for a report about a classified F-16 Fighting Falcon data leak to War Thunder.

Click here for a report about a classified Eurofighter Typhoon leak to War Thunder.

Click here for a report of a classified data breach regarding British Challenger II tanks.

Unauthorized releases of classified information by users who intend to improve game play has become such a problem that there are reports that just playing the game is now considered a red flag during background checks.