PC Gaming Market In Japan Is Growing Fast

Japan equals consoles. For many years and decades, this was not just a cliché, but also a verifiable reality. But in the past few years, that’s all changed, with the PC gaming market doubling between 2018 and 2021. And there is no end in sight.

Nintendo as well as PlayStation and that’s pretty much it. This has been the reality of Japanese gamers for many years. In contrast to Europe and North America, the PC had at best an extra role. However, Windows Central is currently reporting that PC gaming is “shooting up like a rocket”. According to current calculations by the Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories (via KantanGames ), the PC gaming market is currently around 131.3 billion yen, which is the equivalent of 898 million euros.

PC Gaming and gamers are exploding

That means roughly a doubling of spending in a three-year period. But not only the investments of Japanese gamers are increasing, but their number is also growing quite rapidly. In 2015, 11 million Japanese said they were PC gamers, now that number is more than 16 million – Japan has a total of about 126 million inhabitants.

The reasons are quite “international”. Because according to market researchers, Japanese gamers have increasingly turned to the PC during the pandemic. Another reason was homegrown, namely the PS5 delivery issues: some gamers who wanted a PlayStation 5 got tired of waiting for a Sony device and decided to get a powerful PC instead.

Finally, the availability of Japanese games for PC and the increasing popularity of indie games also play a role. Of course: Compared to the console market, the PC is and will remain a small number, because gaming in total (console hardware and software, smartphone and PC games together) accounted for two trillion last year – that’s around 14 billion dollars.