Japanese gamers have continued to embrace the PC as a platform at staggering rates, jumping up 43% from 131.3 billion yen to 189.2 billion yen in 2022. That’s a total size of about $1.3 billion US. The data comes from the latest report by Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories, an industry think tank which compiles yearly material about the performance of the gaming industry in Japan and abroad.
For comparison various analysts peg growth rates in the US PC Gaming market at between 1-2% in 2022, on a market of something like $9-10 billion, as growth stabilizes following a boom during the pandemic. The global gaming market as a whole actually shrunk in 2022—for the same reason.
A post-pandemic drop that, it should be noted, didn’t slow down Japanese PC gaming much at all. It’s another year of data proving that though conventional wisdom once said PC Gaming in Japan was niche, it ain’t niche anymore. Japanese gamers are joining the rest of Asia demographically, where PC gaming is by far the largest segment of the hardcore or hobby gaming market. (Mobile gaming, of course, outstrips everything else everywhere.)
PC games used to be popular in Japan before Nintendo and Sony changed everything in the 90’s. Seems like with Sony slowly disengaging from the Japanese market to cater to the West, PC has come in and filled that space. I’m sure Steam really pushing PC Gaming off of the desk with Big Picture Mode, Steam Deck and excellent controller support has made it much more appealing to Japanese game culture.
Sony really shot itself in the foot with how it decided to prioritize the NA and EU market over Japan. PS5s were becoming readily available in those markets but were still so rare in Japan electronic stores were still doing lotteries for a chance to buy one - and then they raised the prices when you still couldn’t even get them yet here because of shortages. They’ve only recently become available over here, but not really - the electronics store near me only has the regular PS5 and not the diskless model. And I’m not in the middle of nowhere; this is in the middle of Osaka.
I bet a lot of folks here are like me - they just got sick of waiting and started PC gaming. Thanks to the pandemic, a lot of people who didn’t have PCs at home in 2019 ended up having to get them for WFH and online classes, so PC gaming became a lot more feasible than it had been.
Computer games were popular, but from what I remember about Japan and PC gaming in the 90’s was that they didn’t usually have IBM compatible machines and used their own funky shit, which had their own funky games.
Proud of these numbers.
The more PC gamers in Japan, the more likely we will get PC releases.
I wonder how much stuff like streaming and esports contributed to PC gaming growing in Japan.
I expect the growing availability of portable PC gaming systems to further boost this growth. It’s known the japanese public is very biased towards portable gaming devices, which is why the Nintendo Switch dominates by market share.
I’ve started seeing the ROG Ally and, in bigger stores both it and the Steam Deck, in electronic stores over here recently.
