Japanese PC gaming saw another year of explosive growth
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.
They had the PC-98, which was almost but not quite compatible.
Pc has also become a better value proposition. You get more games, generally better pricing, great support for older games, and it can do more than games. You also get console or better performance with similarly priced hardware, or if you spend a lot you can probably get something better than next gen consoles will be.
That’s not my experience. I get much better performance at higher resolutions on my PS5 than I do on my 2.5x more expensive PC.
To get a little closer in performance, the GPU alone would have to be more expensive than the whole console.
You can make near-equivalent builds at a similar price, this one for example. And this is with new parts, if you buy used the skies the limit.
That build is at $530 with discounts. Add $70 for a DualSense 2 and it's $600.
A Digital PS5 retail is $500, so the PC here is 20% more expensive. If you get the PS5 on a discount (the compared PC is discounted), the difference could go up to about 40%.
On top of that, I guarantee you that its real world performance is not on par to that of a PS5. My own PC has better RAM, better CPU, better GPU and better SSD and it's still not quite there.
Again, to get comparative real world performance you'll need to spend at least as much as the console on the GPU alone.
Well that's why I said "near-equivalent", $600 vs $450 is comparable. Performance should be close to equal, I don't know what's going on with your particular setup but if your PC has a better CPU/GPU/SSD than a PS5... then it's better than a PS5. Maybe you are getting throttled by some external factor, like temperature or background processes. But I suspect you are running games at full native resolution on your PC and comparing it to console games, but "4k" is never actually "4k" on a console. They often use some tricks to run at lower resolutions using upscaling. You can do the exact same thing on PC if you wish.
PC gaming has always been better value though, this doesn't really explain the sudden rise
Proud of these numbers.
The more PC gamers in Japan, the more likely we will get PC releases.
provided it means we get more PC ports, i'm happy.
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.
Think Valve only recently partnered with a distributor for East Asia, so the Steam Decks are slowly showing up in Japan and South Korea. Asus of course has a good distribution network, so generally where they're strong you'll see Allys. I still can't get a Steam Deck in a store, but can get an Ally (and probably the Legion Go).
Had my steam deck in Taiwan for quite a while but I don't know if it's on store shelves here.
I’ve seen them in Edion, an electronics chain, in Japan, and they seem to have a partnership of some kind with them - the first time you could do a hands-on anywhere in Japan was at an Edion in Osaka, and that’s where I’ve seen the physically on sale recently (as in, only in the last month or two). The only person I know with one ordered it online.
Yea, think Komodo is working with Edion for in-store sales. Saw an announcement somewhere when I was reading about Steam Deck sales in Asia (which sadly, just three countries in East Asia).
I wonder how much stuff like streaming and esports contributed to PC gaming growing in Japan.