People and Communities
Analysts, critics, reporters, and executives who lead the global games conversation, plus the online gaming communities where fans gather.
A short list of analysts, critics, reporters and executives who cover the industry. You're welcome and encouraged to submit a source.
Language
73 of 73 shown
These rows
| Portrait | Name | Role | Who they are | Language | Where they post |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Christopher Dring | Founder, The Game Business (ex-GamesIndustry.biz) | Publishes UK and EU sales charts and market data commentary nobody else assembles. Interviews platform holders on the record | English | |
 | Jason Schreier | Reporter, Bloomberg | Breaking industry-structure reporting (layoffs, acquisitions, studio mismanagement) with primary sourcing. Also covers the labor angle no analyst touches | English | Bluesky + Bloomberg |
 | Joost van Dreunen | NYU Stern, SuperJoost Playlist | Academic-grade frameworks applied to current deals and platform strategy. Bridges investor and scholarly views of the industry | English | |
 | Mat Piscatella | Senior Director & Video Game Industry Advisor, Circana | Posts the monthly US sales/MAU charts everyone else screenshots. Threads add methodology context (e.g., 2026 digital-projection change) unavailable elsewhere | English | Bluesky |
 | Matthew Ball | CEO, Epyllion | Long-form structural essays on games/media economics ('The State of Video Gaming' decks) that set industry-wide framing for a year at a time | English | X |
 | Piers Harding-Rolls | Head of Games Research, Ampere Analysis | Console/subscription market sizing and M&A analysis from one of the few independent UK research shops. Regular public columns | English | |
 | Simon Carless | Founder, GameDiscoverCo | The reference source for Steam/PC discoverability data: wishlist conversion, platform trends, monthly new-release charts | English | |
 | Stephen Totilo | Founder, Game File | Original reporting on platform policy, ratings boards, and company decisions. Breaks primary-document stories (FTC filings, lawsuits) usable as Tier A sources | English | X |
 | Eric Benjamin Seufert | Mobile Dev Memo, Heracles Capital | The reference analyst on mobile ad-tech, ATT/privacy fallout, and platform economics. Annual mobile-gaming predictions are an industry fixture | English | X |
 | Matej Lancaric | Independent UA consultant, Brutally Honest newsletter, two & a half gamers podcast | Granular, practitioner-level UA and creative-strategy teardowns of specific live mobile titles. Names numbers and networks | English | |
 | Michail Katkoff | Founder, Deconstructor of Fun | Systems-level deconstructions of top-grossing F2P games and annual 'state of mobile' reviews. The standard vocabulary for F2P design analysis | English | |
 | Phillip Black | Co-host, Game Economist Cast | Applies actual economics training (pricing theory, market design) to game monetization. The analytical layer above standard F2P commentary | English | |
 | Jakub Remiar | Product & Game Design Consultant | Game designer using psychological background to better understand player experience and current market trends in the games industry. | English | |
 | Anton Slashcev | Founder @ Playhero | Co-founder of Unlock Games and Dino Games | English | |
 | Ashley Kang (강지혜) | Founder, Korizon Esports | The main English-language bridge into LCK/Korean esports. On-the-ground reporting and interviews, plus rare public documentation of Korean team-press dynamics. Secondary beat: esports business | English | YouTube |
 | Kim Seong-hoe (김성회) | Ex-game developer, runs 김성회의 G식백과 | The de facto public-policy explainer for Korean gaming: led the 210,751-signatory constitutional challenge to the Game Industry Act's pre-censorship clause, testified at National Assembly audits, presented at a presidential 민생토론회 on loot-box odds. Video format but the function is regulation/industry explanation. Scope-rule borderline, curator's call | Korean | YouTube |
 | Lee Jang-ju (이장주) | Director, 이락디지털문화연구소, cultural psychologist (PhD) | The main Korean academic voice countering gaming-disorder/질병코드 framing with psychological research. Regular columns (Edaily, 게임뷰) analyzing hits like 붉은사막 through cultural psychology, the KR parent/family/anxiety discourse layer. Secondary beat: kids, family & platform policy | Korean | Press columns (Edaily, ETnews, 게임뷰) + conferences |
 | Lee Kyung-hyuk (이경혁) | Editor-in-chief, GameGeneration (게임제너레이션), director, Dragon Lab | Runs Korea's dedicated games-criticism webzine. PhD work on games as time-rights commodities. Author of 『현질의 탄생』 on Korean monetization culture, the meaning layer KR trade press doesn't cover | Korean | gamegeneration.or.kr + books/columns |
 | Lim Hui-seok (임희석) | Internet/Games Analyst, Mirae Asset Securities | Sell-side games analyst posting a daily public Telegram digest: KR/global games news, Google Play grossing rank movements, and his own coverage notes (Krafton, NCSoft, Nexon) in near-real time. The single fastest public feed on Korean publisher performance | Korean | Telegram |
 | Wi Jong-hyun (위정현) | Professor, Chung-Ang University, Korea Game Society | The most-quoted academic voice on KR game policy: P2E, loot-box regulation, China export licenses. Runs his own strategy-commentary YouTube channel | Korean | YouTube |
 | David Gibson | Senior Analyst, MST Financial (Tokyo/Adelaide) | Sell-side coverage of Nintendo/Sony posted publicly in near-real time: hardware forecasts, tariff/pricing math, earnings reads. Frequently ahead of trade press | English | X (@gibbogame) |
 | Jini | Writer/editor, ゲームゼミ / Interacrit, lecturer, Tokyo University of the Arts | Japan's leading independent paid games-criticism operation on note.com. Long-form analysis of games as culture and business, JP industry context unavailable in English | Japanese | note.com |
 | Dr. Serkan Toto | CEO, Kantan Games (Tokyo) | Tokyo-based consultant translating JP industry filings and moves for a global audience in real time (e.g., Pokémon Co. financials from Kanpo gazette filings) | English | X |
 | Chenyu Cui | Senior Analyst, Games, Omdia (Shanghai) | Published APAC market monitors spanning China and Korea PC/online markets, one of few analysts covering both under one methodology. Secondary beat: Korea. Reports are paid. | English | Omdia research |
 | Daniel Ahmad | Director of Research & Insights, Niko Partners | The default English-language source on China game approvals, regulation, and Tencent/NetEase strategy. @ZhugeEX threads are the fastest reliable read on ISBN batches. Secondary beat: market analysts | English | X |
 | Hongyu 'Eddie' Chen | APAC Coordinator, The Esports Advocate | Described as the only China-based Chinese journalist writing esports business for Western media: Hero Esports/VSPO, tournament economics, sponsorships from inside the market. Secondary beat: esports business | English | X |
 | Josh Ye | Tech Correspondent, Reuters (Hong Kong) | Wire-service reporting on Tencent, NetEase, and China gaming regulation with primary sourcing. Career-long games beat (ex-SCMP/Abacus) | English | X |
 | Lisa Hanson | CEO, Niko Partners | 20+ years of China market modeling. Podcast and Substack appearances explain regulatory and market-entry dynamics at the strategic level | English | |
 | Tobias Seck | Co-founder & business analyst, The Esports Advocate | The rare esports writer with a finance-analyst background, reading earnings reports and insolvency filings rather than press releases | English | esportsadvocate.net |
 | Andy Robertson | Founder, Family Video Game Database, author, Taming Gaming, freelance (Forbes/BBC/Guardian) | Runs the largest hand-researched family games database (3,700+ titles) with PEGI/accessibility/parental-control detail. Live reporting from family-gaming events | English | X |
 | Rachel Kowert, PhD | Research psychologist, founder, Psychgeist, Visiting Researcher, Cambridge | Monthly digests of trust & safety, extremism, and mental-health research in games, translated for practitioners. Has testified to US Congress. Secondary beat: academics who post | English | |
 | Sonia Livingstone | Professor, LSE, Digital Futures for Children | Leads the research program behind most serious UK/EU children's-digital-rights policy (RITEC, age-appropriate design). The 'Parenting for a Digital Future' blog posts ongoing research | English | |
 | Dal Yong Jin | Distinguished Professor, Simon Fraser University | The central scholar of Korean game industry and platform imperialism in English, essential where the Korea shelf is thin. Steady stream of new books/papers | English | Academic publications |
 | Marc Steinberg | Professor, Concordia University | Platform studies and Japan's media-mix economy, the theoretical framework behind how JP games/IP franchising actually works | English | X |
 | Mia Consalvo | Professor, Concordia University | Long-running research on cheating, monetization ethics, and player cultures. Regularly posts and podcasts about current games research | English | Academic publications |
 | Salone Sehgal | Founding General Partner, Lumikai | India (IN): the most-quoted analyst on Indian gaming market structure. Leads the State of India report and gave the definitive framing of the post-RMG-ban market reset. Active through the 2025 report cycle and 2026 press | English | |
 | Rishi Alwani | Co-founder, The Mako Reactor, bylines in Yahoo Finance India, IGN India | India (IN): two decades covering the console/PC side of the Indian market (pricing, distribution, platform-holder neglect) and a reliable corrective to gambling-adjacent PR framing. Publishing through 2026 | English | X |
 | Ernesto Piedras | Director General, The CIU | Mexico (MX): the economist behind essentially all recurring Mexican gaming market data. Publishes gaming/telecom analyses continuously (console-market piece July 2026) and is the default expert quoted by national business press | Spanish | X |
 | Hugo Abel Castro Duarte | President, GDMEX, director of Gamacon | Mexico (MX): the most visible advocate-explainer of the Mexican dev industry. Fiscal policy, LatAm positioning, industry formalization. A trade-association president and event owner, so read as informed advocacy, not neutral analysis | Spanish | |
 | Darang S. Candra | Director for Southeast Asia & East Asia Research, Niko Partners (Jakarta-based) | SEA: the most consistently cited analyst on Southeast Asian gaming. Market models, esports economics, cybercafé and regulation analysis across all six markets. A decade of research experience and active through 2026 | Bahasa Indonesia, English | |
 | Ozan Aydemir | CEO, Gaming in Türkiye, MENA and EU, author of the Türkiye Game Market Report | Turkey (TR): the person behind the sector's primary reference report for a decade. His commentary frames each year's data (2026: the shift from user growth to engagement depth). Quoted by every national outlet covering the market | English, Turkish | |
 | KooPee Hiltunen | Director, Neogames Finland | Nordics (Finland): the most-quoted explainer of the Finnish industry's condition. Writes candid state-of-the-industry analyses (including a frank 2026 assessment of the funding and layoff climate) rather than promotional summaries | English, Finnish | |
 | Johanna Nylander | Editor, Spelutvecklarindex / Game Developer Index (Dataspelsbranschen) | Nordics (Sweden): editor of the bloc's flagship data series and its research team lead, the person behind the methodology every Swedish industry figure rests on. Current through the 2025 edition | English, Swedish | |
| Bluesky starter pack directory, games sections | N/A | The single durable entry point to the Bluesky curated-list layer. Its games journalism, game journalists and gaming journalism sections index roughly 28 packs between them, covering critics, magazine makers, journalists turned developers and per-outlet staff lists. Start here rather than trying to keep a roster of packs current. | English, Multilingual | Web directory indexing Bluesky | |
| Games Writers, by Reconnect | N/A | Over 200 games writers in one pack, the largest games-writing list found in this scan. The companion to reconnect.quest and the best single starting point for Anglophone games writing. | English | Bluesky | |
| Reconnect (reconnect.quest) | N/A | An aggregator of games writing with per-writer pages rather than a follow list, so it routes to the work instead of the account. Useful where you want to read someone before deciding to follow them. | English | Web | |
| JV, Culture Jeu Vidéo (journalistes) | N/A | The Bluesky accounts of journalists writing for JV magazine. Narrow by design and therefore useful, since it maps one French outlet's masthead rather than the whole market. | French | Bluesky | |
| Gente guay de los videojuegos a la que seguir | N/A | Press, developers, writers and industry professionals working in games in Spain. Cross-market rather than single-outlet, which makes it the broadest Spanish-language entry point found here. | Spanish | Bluesky | |
| Video Game Critics & Journalists | N/A | People who write about games, described by its curator as running from investigative reporters to tastemakers. A second volume exists, which is a signal the first filled up. | English | Bluesky | |
| Game Journos turned Game Devs | N/A | People who moved from writing about games to making them. A niche no general pack covers, and useful for tracing how the press and development layers connect. | English | Bluesky | |
| Nick Yee | Co-founder, Quantic Foundry | Publishes free survey findings on player motivation broken out by age, gender, region and genre, plus method posts on survey panel fraud and AI-generated survey responses. OWNERSHIP FLAG. Quantic Foundry sells the analytics the blog demonstrates. | English | Quantic Foundry blog | |
| Nick Ballou | Lead, Digital Kaleidoscope Group, Imperial College London | Runs the Open Play study and writes plainly about why most published claims linking play time to mental health are weakly evidenced. Posts two or three times a year, so this is a blog rather than a newsletter. | English | Personal blog | |
| Matti Vuorre | Assistant Professor, Tilburg University | Publishes the data and code for every gaming and wellbeing paper he writes, so a researcher can reproduce the analysis rather than cite the abstract. | English | Personal site | |
| Andrew Przybylski | Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology, Oxford Internet Institute | Principal investigator on the industry-data collaborations that produced the only large open player behaviour datasets, and a consistent public sceptic of screen-time effect sizes. Advises Google and OpenAI expert councils, which should be disclosed when citing him on platform harms. | English | University profile | |
| Alena Denisova | Senior Lecturer, University of York | Works specifically on whether player experience questionnaires measure what they claim, and is meta-author of the PX Questionnaires Repository. Read her before adopting any player experience scale. | English | University profile | |
| Steve Bromley | Independent games user researcher, formerly PlayStation | Monthly method write-ups on planning, running and reporting a playtest, aimed at studios with no research function. Sells playtests, consulting and courses alongside the free writing. | English | Personal site | |
| Celia Hodent | Independent game UX strategist, chair of the GDC UX Summit | Applies cognitive psychology to interface and onboarding design and writes on ethical design and dark patterns. The free material is talks and video, the written work is paid. | English, French | Bluesky | |
| Kishonna Gray | Professor of Information, University of Michigan | Ethnographic work on race, gender and harassment in online gaming, including sustained fieldwork on Xbox Live. | English | University profile | |
| Adrienne Shaw | Associate Professor, Temple University | Founder of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, and the fastest route into the primary literature on LGBTQ representation in games and into the argument about how you document it at all. | English | ||
| TreaAndrea Russworm | Professor and Associate Dean of Research, USC School of Cinematic Arts | Edited Gaming Representation and runs a community-engaged research and design lab, which connects the scholarly literature on race in games to actual production practice. | English | Personal site | |
| Soraya Murray | Professor, UC Santa Cruz | Reads games as visual culture, which gives a way into race, gender and space in games that comes from art history and film rather than from media effects research. | English | Personal site | |
| Carly Kocurek | Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies, Illinois Institute of Technology | Cultural history of arcade and computer gaming with gender and class as the organising questions, which is the route to understanding how games got coded as a young male pursuit. | English | University profile | |
| Hanna Wirman | Associate Professor, IT University of Copenhagen | Publishes on game fandom, gender, critical game design and play in the Chinese context. Former DiGRA President and first President of Chinese DiGRA, which makes her the practical route into that chapter. | English | ||
| Larissa Hjorth | Distinguished Professor, RMIT | Digital ethnography of mobile media, play, intimacy and ageing across the Asia-Pacific, and supervises fieldwork including mobile esports in Indonesian popular culture. Recent work includes Mourning on Mobile Media (MIT Press, November 2025, open access) and, with Ingrid Richardson, the mobile games chapter of The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, which she co-edited (second edition, 2025). ARC Future Fellow to 2027. | English | ||
| Johanna Weststar | Associate Professor, Western University | The academic behind the IGDA Developer Satisfaction Survey and long-running work on collective organising among game workers, so she is the route to peer-reviewed evidence rather than survey headlines. | English | ||
| Jamie Woodcock | Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy, King's College London | Sociologist of the games labour process and author of Marx at the Arcade, which provides the frame most games labour scholarship now argues with. | English | Personal site | |
| 安田秀樹 (Hideki Yasuda) | Analyst, Toyo Research Advice from April 2026 (Toyo Securities 2022 to 2026, Ace Securities and Ace Research before that) | The most-quoted Japanese sell-side voice on Nintendo, Sony and Bandai Namco, with columns on Diamond Online, Kabutan and Business Insider Japan; reads results the way the Tokyo market does. | Japanese | Diamond Online, Kabutan, Business Insider Japan | |
| 岡本吉起 (Yoshiki Okamoto) | Game producer (Street Fighter II at Capcom, Monster Strike at Mixi); runs the YouTube channel 岡本吉起 ゲームch from Malaysia | A veteran creator talking budgets, deals and failures on camera in plain Japanese; 72,400 subscribers, so the influence is on the industry, not the mass audience. | Japanese | YouTube | |
| Sal Romano | Editor-in-chief and sole operator, Gematsu (New York) | Runs the fastest English read on Japanese publisher announcements and posts the Famitsu chart every week; one person, so the coverage is what he chooses. | English | X, Gematsu | |
| Marcelo Gimenes Vieira | Founder and editor-in-chief, The Gaming Era (since 2024) | Weekly reporting on the business of Brazilian games, from the Abragames industry census to publishers' local licensing, hardware makers' regional plans and consumer surveys. He founded and edits the outlet he writes for, so his reporting and The Gaming Era's are one. | Portuguese | The Gaming Era | |
| Pablo Miyazawa | Co-founder and columnist, The Gaming Era | An interview column on the Brazilian games business, "Discutindo o jogo com…", and pieces on subjects such as TecToy's pricing of the Zeenix Pro and São Paulo state's plan to fund studios, from a journalist with nearly three decades in Brazilian games and entertainment media. He co-owns The Gaming Era, where he publishes, and his pieces come months apart rather than weekly. | Portuguese | The Gaming Era | |
| Mateus Mognon | Editor, Voxel and Minha Série | Brazilian games coverage from the editor of Voxel and Minha Série, the NZN group's games and series sites, collected on his own newsletter: reviews, developer interviews and first-person pieces on the Brazilian scene, such as what developers and staff told him about the 'dark side' of gamescom latam (May 2025) and how he covered Hideo Kojima's visit to Brasil Game Show 2025. Consumer coverage more than business analysis, much of it reposting work first published on Voxel, with posts months apart; he also writes the weekly Jornal dos Jogos digest. | Portuguese | Substack, Voxel | |
| Abhimannu Das | Web journalist, Outlook Respawn (Outlook India) | Near-daily reporting on Indian games and esports: the India Games Showcase, Indian indie studios in his Indian Indie Diaries series, college esports prize pools, state game-development policy panels, and global industry news. He writes for Outlook Respawn, so his work and the desk's overlap. | English | Outlook Respawn |