What is this beast? What dark magic did you use to summon it? All the details are below, fellow traveler, including who this is for, where it came from, how it was assembled, what was checked, and what was not.
Directory last compiled 23 August 2026 · 813 sources · 10 markets · 31 trends
My wife says it's because I'm a rising Virgo. I have no idea what that means, so I'll explain in my own way.
I built this site while preparing for semiotic and ethnographic fieldwork on the culture of video games across several markets, including non-Western ones. I do desk research to prepare for that type of fieldwork because, as an old Korean aphorism goes, what you see depends on what you know.
But as I began that research, I realized that I did not understand the industry very well. Not even in the United States, where I grew up playing Zork on an Apple IIe. I couldn't find a single resource that set out, per market, who reports on games, which bodies regulate and represent them, which datasets are trustworthy and which are marketing, and who is worth following.
Probably the largest gap is trends. Coverage of the gaming industry is enormous and most of it traces back to a small number of underlying movements that are poorly enumerated. If you read twenty Aftermath articles or twenty subreddits or twenty 5ch threads about gaming, you're likely reading twenty accounts of the same four trends. Playtime caps for minors. Generative AI in development. Monetization on a flat player base. The rise of Chinese studios and original IP. Trends are the first door here for that reason. They help answer the question wtf is even happening in this industry right now. No seriously, wtf.
Strategists and researchers, basically. Professionals who have been handed a games brief and are new to the industry, or want a map for finding what they need. The assumption is you don't have a vendor subscription, you probably have a deadline, and you're lacking a reliable way to tell a serious source from a content marketing blog. Lots of those! But not on this site.
Nothing here sits behind a login or a fee. Where a source is paid, the row says so and points at it rather than reproducing what it sells.
This site doesn't report on anything. It's a starter pack for researching on your own. And so, the site does not contain:
A directory of studios or games. Studios come and go. Games, too. This site points instead at the associations, databases, and trade press that track them.
Analysis. The reading behind the content on this site helped to produce conclusions that are guarded by several well-paid lawyers and probably a bridge troll. What is here, instead, is the material that made those conclusions possible.
Licensed vendor data. Where a paid platform or research firm holds the better figures, the row names it and links to it. Nothing they sell is reproduced.
Rankings. Sources are grouped and described, not scored. No ranking of people appears anywhere, because the job of a directory is to route you to work rather than rank the people doing it. Also because we are all God's special little f'd up creatures.
Truly exhaustive and complete lists of anything. The games industry is a colossus standing on a behemoth standing on Unicron. I did my best to find the most useful entry points for each market, and included the ones that helped me the most. Some markets are more complete than others. Such is the never-ending nature of this Sisyphean task I've chosen for myself. Corrections and recommendations are welcome, should you have strident opinions, and there are instructions for sending them at the bottom of this page.
The first two months were reading. My research process is usually to jump feet first into something and then, after getting my feet wet, realize I've landed in the pit of Eternal Stench. No but seriously. Raw notes first. I like to follow a maxim that has served me well over the years: build the collection before you build the museum.
I started in the United States, the market I know best, working outward from publications I already used as a player. I kept raw notes as I went, in a Notion project with linked databases, and cleaned them up periodically into categories. The trend list came out of that sorting. Nothing was imposed on the notes from outside. I then repeated the process in two markets I did not know, beginning with the obvious publications in each, plus general and model-assisted search, reading widely before filtering.
Working through what data exists came next. Platforms both free and paid, and the analysts whose reports the industry actually reads. Two problems surfaced there and both are recorded across this site. Market size figures are not comparable across markets, because every market publishes on a different basis, in a different year, against a different definition of a player. And, annoyingly, the games industry does not share a common taxonomy. What one vendor publishes as one genre another publishes as something else, so two datasets that appear to describe the same thing very much do not.
Claude was used throughout, and used more heavily once the scope widened past the original markets. I wrote a project instruction set and research skills, then used them to generate candidate lists: publications covering the industry in a given market, trade associations, data platforms, and so on. Claude also drafted summary copy. Claude, despite his and her and their enthusiasm, did not decide what got in.
Every source here was opened and read by this guy (points thumbs at self) before its description was written. That took a while.
No row went up on a summary alone. For each source I confirmed it is what it claims to be, then read enough of it to write or correct the line describing what it lets you find out.
I read English and Spanish unaided. Everything else I read through in-browser translation or Claude translation, which is enough to confirm what a source is and what it covers, and not enough to catch nuance in the source's own writing.
Not checked
This site checks that a source is what it says it is. It does not check the claims the source makes. A number you find through this directory carries exactly the authority of the outlet that published it and no more. Where a source has a stake in what it reports, the row says so, but that flag is a warning to read carefully rather than a correction to the figure.
Derived from The boundary of the verification standard, stated so it is not assumed to be wider than it is.
Reading and note-taking ran from May to June 2026. Compilation into the workbook ran through July and August 2026. Every row was verified within that window. The site carries one date for the directory as a whole rather than a date on each row.
Like our great modern poet Ferris Bueller somberly intoned, life moves pretty fast. Use this site as a starting point, but do your own research to back up any claims.
The data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it, adapt it, and publish from it, including in commercial work. Attribution to this site is required by the licence. A link is the easy way to do it. Buying me a mezcal is optional but well received.
Corrections are wanted, including ones that argue a source does not belong here or that a person or outlet or community is missing. Send them to games@thisisdelightful.com, and say which row and what is wrong with it. A correction is made in the workbook and published on the next pass rather than patched on the page, so the files and the pages change together.
Updates happen in passes as research proceeds, with no fixed schedule. So, like, once every sometimes. Brazil and India are the next markets, huzzah.
