Community detection in social networks has received much attention from the researchers of multiple disciplines due to its impactful applications such as recommendation systems, link prediction, and anomaly detection. The focus of community detection is to determine the more dense subgraphs of the network which are called communities. The nodes of the community are expected to have similar features and interests. Assuming the nodes as selfish agents, the evolution of communities can be effectively modelled as a community formation game. Game theory provides a systematic framework to model the competition and coordination among the players. In the past decade, there are several contributions from the domain of game theory to address the problem of community detection in social networks. In this paper, we make a comprehensive survey that studies and provides an insight into available game theory-based community detection algorithms. The current study provides the taxonomy of game models and their characteristics along with their performance. We discuss the interesting applications of game theory for social networks and also provide further research directions as well as some open challenges. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Wien.