Understanding the Games Industry

Thirty-three platforms — the storefronts, console ecosystems, livestreaming services and the UGC platforms games are now built inside — each with what it is, who owns it, and which markets it serves. Ownership is recorded rather than assumed, because who owns a storefront is itself one of the trends this directory tracks.

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Logo	Name	What it is	Category	Markets	Link
	Steam	The dominant PC storefront and the best-instrumented platform in games. It is the reason PC research is even possible. Valve publishes concurrents and rankings only. Every unit or revenue number anywhere is a third-party estimate. JP data historically weak, growing.	Storefront	Global	Valve
	Epic Games Store	Challenger storefront and Fortnite launcher. It matters for exclusives and free-game economics. Structurally opaque. The free-games program makes install counts meaningless as demand signals.	Storefront	Global	Epic Games
	DMM GAMES	Japan's domestic PC/browser games storefront (Kantai Collection lineage, Umamusume PC). It is a JP market layer invisible to Western trackers. You'll need to use a VPN to access. Adult-content adjacency exists on the wider DMM platform. Flag it for family-brand research contexts.	Storefront	JP	DMM.com
	Nintendo (Switch ecosystem)	The family-play console default and JP market anchor. Hardware install base drives everything downstream. eShop digital charts are not archived publicly, and Nintendo is absent from GSD digital. JP digital share is a blind spot.	Console ecosystem	Global, JP	Nintendo
	PlayStation	The default premium console in most Big 8 markets. Segment aggregation hides per-title detail. MAU definitions shift between reports.	Console ecosystem	Global, US, EU, JP	Sony
	Xbox	Post-Activision, it is more a subscription/service layer (Game Pass) than a box. It is the platform whose strategy is hardest to read from data. The most opaque major platform. Treat all Game Pass impact claims as unverifiable.	Console ecosystem	US, UK	Microsoft
	Apple App Store	Half the mobile duopoly. It is where premium mobile spend concentrates. Apple discloses rankings, never numbers. Post-DMA/Epic-ruling third-party payment and web stores erode store-reported revenue completeness, so vendor revenue is increasingly a floor.	Mobile store	Global, JP, US	Apple
	Google Play	The other half of the duopoly. It covers the Android world outside China. Absent from China entirely (no Play there). In Korea, One Store share is invisible in Play-only views.	Mobile store	Global	Google
	One Store (원스토어)	Korea's domestic Android store. It holds material market share that global vendor default views miss entirely. A structural reason KR mobile numbers from global vendors run low. Always state whether One Store is in scope.	Mobile store	KR	One Store Inc. (carrier JV)
	Twitch	The EN-default live platform and the reference culture most streaming research wrongly assumes to be universal. Twitch exited Korea in Feb 2024 (network costs), and KR live culture now lives on Chzzk/SOOP. Twitch data tells you nothing about Korea.	Livestreaming	US, EU	Amazon
	YouTube (Gaming / Live)	Live and VOD in one culture. Japan's VTuber economy concentrates here, making JP YouTube structurally unlike JP Twitch. The gaming/general boundary is blurry, and channel-level "gaming" classification varies by vendor. Super Chat leaderboards skew JP/VTuber. Beware the difference between a livestreamer and a YouTuber who publishes edited videos, these are different but overlapping cultures.	Video and live hybrid	Global, JP	Google
	Kick	A Twitch-lookalike with structurally different culture and moderation posture. Its economics are gambling-adjacent. Culturally unrelated to Twitch despite the identical format. Never merge Kick and Twitch creator lists into one "streaming" ranking. Gambling adjacency makes this a family-brand avoid zone.	Livestreaming	Global, BR	Stake-adjacent (Easygo)
	TikTok Live	The largest hole in streaming research: enormous live viewership with near-zero per-game instrumentation in any vendor. Industry estimates put TikTok Live at roughly half of live-streaming hours. Any "total streaming market" claim that omits TikTok Live is materially wrong. KR viewership is heavy.	Livestreaming	Global, KR	ByteDance
	SOOP (ex-AfreecaTV)	Korea's legacy live platform (BJ culture, esports lineage), rebranded from AfreecaTV in 2024 SOOP Korea and SOOP Global are distinct services. Do not merge their numbers.	Livestreaming	KR	SOOP Co.
	Chzzk (치지직)	Naver's live platform, launched into the vacuum of Twitch's 2024 Korea exit. It is now the KR streamer default alongside SOOP. (Naver is the oldest search platform in Korea.) A young platform with fast-moving share. Any figure older than a quarter is stale. Partnership migrations are still reshaping rankings.	Livestreaming	KR	Naver
	Facebook Gaming	Residual live platform after the 2022 app shutdown. It matters mainly in SEA/LatAm creator economies. Never forget that Facebook is popular for non-normies outside the US. Declining and thinly instrumented. Audience-location data is sparse.	Livestreaming	SEA, LATAM	Meta
	niconico (ニコニコ動画)	Culturally foundational to JP internet play (MAD culture, VOCALOID, 実況 commentary lineage) even as commercial weight faded to YouTube Research it for cultural lineage, not current scale. The 2024 cyberattack disrupted archives. Verify availability.	Video and live hybrid	JP	KADOKAWA (Dwango)
	Roblox	The sandbox economy at scale, and the rare platform that publishes real engagement data (public company). Bookings are not revenue. The 13+/under-13 split is coarse. Creator-economy payout framing is IR-managed. KR adoption is notable.	UGC platform	US, Global, KR	Roblox Corp.
	Minecraft	The most-played, least-measured game-as-platform. No public analytics exist at all. Every Minecraft scale claim traces to a dated press release. Check the announcement date before citing.	UGC platform	Global	Microsoft (Mojang)
	Fortnite (Creative / UEFN)	Creator islands with real payout economics. It is the third sandbox alongside Roblox and Minecraft. The community tracker reads Epic's public API, so coverage is what Epic exposes. Payout economics are known only from Epic announcements.	UGC platform	US, EU	Epic Games
	Discord	Where game communities actually live: the coordination layer under modern play. It is essential context, not a data source. A private company with no disclosures. Activity is unmeasurable from outside. Resist inferring scale from server counts.	Social infrastructure	Global	Discord Inc.
	Bilibili	China's youth video/game culture hub and a licensed game publisher. It is the CN platform most legible to outside researchers (US-listed, IR in English). Thematic-touch scope only. The CN data environment is structurally different. Route through Niko Partners rather than DIY.	Video and live hybrid	CN	Bilibili Inc.
	Douyin / Huya / DouYu	China's live-streaming triumvirate consists of Douyin (short-video-native live) plus the two legacy game-live platforms, both Tencent-orbit. Thematic-touch scope.	Livestreaming	CN	ByteDance / Tencent-linked
	Nuuvem	The largest LatAm digital games store and the first to sell in BRL. It encodes Brazil's payment reality (Pix, boleto, interest-free installments) that global storefront data misses. Based in Rio de Janeiro. A reseller of keys (Steam/console codes), not a walled platform. No public analytics. Consumer-reputation scores fluctuate.	Storefront	BR, LATAM	Nuuvem Jogos Digitais S.A. (Square Enix investment 2025)
	Gamers Club	The home of Brazilian competitive Counter-Strike (plus Valorant, Free Fire, LoL, R6). It runs 500+ tournaments/yr and owns DRAFT5 and the Gamers Club Media network. Founded 2015 with FalleN among the co-founders, merged into Siprocal in 2023. Features are subscription-gated, with app/login walls on most data. The 2026 sponsorship by betting operator BetBoom colors the ecosystem.	Competitive and community platform	BR, LATAM	Siprocal
	Rooter	India's largest homegrown streaming platform, now fused with an in-game purchase shop. It is the vernacular, mobile-first layer that Twitch and YouTube data misses. Delhi-based, founded 2016. App-first, with a thin web presence. User/GMV figures are company-reported and unaudited.	Livestreaming	IN	Rooter Sports Technologies
	JioGames	The access layer for mass-market India: preloaded on Jio devices and set-top boxes, it runs esports challenges with publishers/Qualcomm. It is a distribution channel with reach no storefront chart captures. A walled telco ecosystem with no third-party data. Strategic direction shifts with Reliance priorities.	Storefront	IN	Reliance Jio
	Codashop	The region's dominant top-up layer, this is how SEA actually pays for games outside app stores. Official publisher partnerships (Moonton, Garena, Krafton, HoYoverse) plus every local payment rail (GoPay, Dana, OVO, GCash, convenience-store cash). Also active across South Asia. Direct carrier billing is core to the model. Coda Payments is Singapore-based. Owner Coda also builds publishers' own webstores, so it sits on both sides of the third-party-payment shift. There is no published data.	Top-up and marketplace	SEA, LATAM, MENA	Coda Payments
	UniPin	Indonesia's homegrown counterpart to Codashop, with deep local-payment integration, IDR pricing, and its own esports circuit (SEACA) and content arm. It is a window on the top-up economy from inside the region. Jakarta-based, operating since 2009. It runs media/community properties promoting the same games it sells top-ups for.	Top-up and marketplace	SEA	UniPin
	Oyunfor	One of the two dominant Turkish digital-goods storefronts: Steam wallet codes, game keys, and in-game currency in TL with local payments. The community treats it as a Steam-listed authorized seller. The epin layer is how many Turkish players route around currency volatility and card limits. Requires TC national-ID for transactions (fraud/compliance), a distinctive access fact. There is no published data.	Top-up and marketplace	TR	Oyunfor
	ByNoGame	Turkey's oldest digital game-goods platform. Players buy and sell in-game currency, skins, and accounts, making it a visible secondary economy (Knight Online gold to CS2 skins) that global storefront data never captures. The skin and item trade reaches international buyers. Account trading sits against most publishers' ToS, a gray-market layer. Commission structures shift. Buyer-protection quality is debated in forums.	Top-up and marketplace	TR	ByNoGame Bilişim Ltd.
	GOG.com	After Steam, the only globally significant PC games storefront in markets outside of the Big 8, and ideologically distinct: DRM-free by rule, plus the GOG Preservation Program restoring and maintaining old titles. Its origins are specifically Polish, built for a market where piracy long outcompeted legitimate sales. Now separated from CD Projekt, so it disappears from those filings going forward, a real loss of public data. There are no analytics. The catalog skews retro.	Storefront	Global, PL	GOG sp. z o.o. (sold by CD Projekt to co-founder Michał Kiciński, December 2025)
PLACEHOLDER logo	TapTap	China's leading third-party Android game store and review community. TapTap China passed 41 million monthly active users in 2022 per owner XD's annual report, and publishers use it as a direct launch channel, miHoYo distributed Genshin Impact there at launch. It is the most legible public surface for what CN players are playing, rating and tagging. ByteDance, miHoYo and Bilibili have held investment stakes, per 2021 TechCrunch reporting. The CN edition (taptap.cn) and global edition (taptap.io) are distinct services, do not merge their numbers. A swarm of lookalike mirror domains exists, use the two official domains only. Ratings and reviews are community sentiment, not evidence of fact. iOS distribution is not part of the model, so TapTap views skew Android.	Mobile store	CN, Global	XD Inc. (心动)