For a long time, Japan was seen as the homeland of video games, and after the video game crash of 1983, it was primarily Nintendo and Sega that led the way to modern consoles. However, over the past 15 years, consoles have sold less and less while the Japanese market has become increasingly portable, both in terms of portable gaming devices and smartphones.
Now non-portable gaming is growing again, but it is not the consoles that have recovered, but the PC market that is offering the boost. The industry organisation CESA reports that PCs now account for 13% of the Japanese gaming market – compared to just 5% five years ago. Japanese analyst Dr. Serkan Toto writes in a report on this that “Japan’s PC gaming market almost tripled in size from 2019 to 2023”.
During the same five years, smartphone gaming has grown by five percentage points, while console gaming has decreased by three percentage points (where Switch success is the reason why it has remained relatively stable).
It seems that we can expect more and more Japanese games to be released on PC in the future, and that PC gaming will continue to grow. Both Microsoft and Sony have already switched to releasing their games on PC, but Nintendo has so far refused to do so, but given the development, we can probably expect that it is something that is being discussed internally.