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.)
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.