Based on the figures of a think tank Japanese company named KADOKAWA ASCII Research Laboratories, analyst Serkan Toto published an article that evokes color from the title: the Japanese PC market has doubled in size in the space of three years.
What was until recently considered a niche market is now a money-making machine. According to the figures of think tankthe PC market is now worth, in 2021, 131.3 billion yen (about 900 million euros, remembering that monetary values have changed a lot in recent months), or about double the value of the same PC market in 2018.
It is therefore almost 7% of the overall Japanese video game market, which represents 2000 billion yen (about 13.65 billion euros). Growth which logically translates into a growing player base: 16 million PC players out of 55.4 million declared players on the archipelago. In 2015, the same think tank had only 11 million PC gamers, which is a 45% growth in the PC gamer base in six years, compared to 22% for the general player base. Even better, 4.5 million players are now exclusive to the PC ecosystem, double from six years ago.
This increase is obviously explained by the combination of the pandemic which has increased the size of the video game market all over the world, and by the shortage of components which has limited the size of the console market. But Japan has specifically discovered the market for indie games available exclusively on PC, nuggets such as Patrick’s Parabox which are played at a low price, far from current console market practices.
More and more Japanese publishers like Capcom or Arc System Works are also starting to bring their games to PC, whereas Japanese games were not very present on these machines a few years ago. A few rare titles are even mostly played on PC despite their presence on consoles, such as Final Fantasy XIV. Distribution platforms like Steam have also made efforts to accommodate the Japanese market, with the display of prices in yen rather than dollars, and the success of FPS and others. battle royale largely driven by streaming growing up in Japan have made games like Apex Legends and PUBG real popular hits.
One figure does not lie: if we look at Steam statistics, Japan is now among the countries that download the most data, with 17.2 petabytes, or 1.7% of the global volume on the Valve platform. This is barely less than France, which is at 1.9% of traffic on Steam. It would even seem that Japan has entered the top 10 of the most promising countries for the platform, far behind China, Russia or the United States, but in the same sphere as Germany, France, the United Kingdom. United, Brazil or Canada, and ahead of South Korea or Poland.