About
Who made this, what it's for, and why anyone would want to write about video games but only the boring parts. Weird. Anyway, the long answer to how this site was built is on Method. This is the short one.
What this is
Delightful's Game Research Starter Pack is a free, openly licensed directory of 813 sources (for now!) on the video games industry, covering ten markets, 31 trends, 33 platforms and 30 genres. It is written and maintained by Steve Bryant and published by Delightful, the research and content studio he founded. The rest of this page is in the first person because talking about yourself in the third person is a dark triad trait, or should be.
The Game Research Starter Pack, or GRSP — pronounced graaassspppp followed by an argh! — is not a publication. Rather, it's a resource for helping you, whoever you are, research the video games industry. The site lets you see, market by market, who covers games there, which bodies regulate and represent them, which datasets are trustworthy, and who is worth following.
I built this wunderkammer of intel while working on a client project. It's the thing I wish I had when I began. The data was first compiled by personally bushwhacking through the unloved wilds of the internet, and afterwards supplemented by agentic search and translation. A robot wrote a lot of the summaries, because that part ain't literature, and I've personally visited every link, because that's what good little research elves do.
The data is CC BY 4.0. Quote it, adapt it, publish from it, use it in commercial work. The licence asks only that you say where it came from, and a link is the easiest way to do that. Nothing here sits behind a login, a fee, or one of those forms that trades a PDF for your work email. Tbh tho that's probably a good idea.
Who made it
I am a researcher and strategist. I run Delightful, a charming studio based in Mexico City. We are two humans and two dogs doing research, brand strategy, content strategy and video for brands and agencies (the dogs mostly just eat). Our work has included projects for Adidas, MetLife, MSCI, Unilever, Bumble and the Royal Institution, and it is largely the same job in different clothes: conceiving content-shaped products and campaigns, managing them, recruiting the people who will run them, building strategy for brands, and working with agencies.
What I am not is a games-industry veteran! I was just faced with a brief, a deadline, and a market I did not know. I built the directory while preparing for semiotic and ethnographic fieldwork on games culture in several markets, Western and otherwise, because the resource I wanted did not exist and I eventually ran out of ways to avoid making it. So the expertise on offer here is in finding, reading and sorting sources, which is the thing I actually do for a living. The expertise about games belongs to the 813 sources, and this site works quite hard to keep those two things apart.
I write about strategy, culture, technology and creative work at stevebryant.substack.com, and I am findable at linkedin.com/in/stevebryant. I also co-founded Rental Car Rally, the world's dumbest motoring event, which has nothing to do with the games industry and everything to do with the quality of judgement you are trusting here. Corrections, arguments, and sources I have missed go to games@thisisdelightful.com. Method has the rest: how the research was done, what was verified, what deliberately was not, and when all of it is from.
My favorite all-time bangers
I said I wasn't a games industry guy but hoo boy do I love video games. As I write this I'm playing Skyrim for the first time on my Switch 2, fifteen years after release. I didn't say I was on the cutting edge. Below, a few games that make my all-time favorites list: