Spying through gaming
There is an elicitation technique in which you make a slightly incorrect statement and the target corrects you, providing you with the information you wanted. The espionage version of Cunningham’s Law. It works great on nerds because we hate it when someone says something wrong.
It appears that War Thunder is basically the gamified equivalent of that. They use slightly incorrect stats for military gear and then someone corrects them with classified information.
Which got me thinking... what if this was pursued as a deliberate strategy? It could work. People become deeply invested in games. Really emotionally attached to the experience. This attachment could be exploited to recruit people and manoeuvre them into disclosing confidential information. We know it works. War Thunder manages to collect classified information for in-game vehicles.
This seems like something that should be investigated. There are already OSINT investigation teams at some games studios. Teams at games with micro transactions game investigate their "whales" so they can craft custom items to sell them.
They could easily pivot; invest the same amount of time and effort into finding players who have access and then crafting scenarios to entice them to trade information for in-game rewards. It sounds far-fetched, but... War Thunder.
Unrelated, almost all major game studios are owned by a Chinese companies.
"Unrelated, almost all major game studios are owned by a Chinese companies."
Hardly true, The majority of games companies are either Japan based or Americas based, with a smaller group that are owned by Euros. There are a few notable ones that are owned by Tencent or other Chinese companies but definitely not 'Almost All' of them