The Japanese PC gaming market will nearly double in three years, growing to approximately US$896 million between 2018 and 2021. The user base of active PC gamers will grow by 5 million between 2015 and 2021, with 4.5 million of them playing exclusively on PC, an increase of more than 100% from 2.2 million PC-only Japanese gamers in 2015.

This new data comes from a recent report by Kadokawa Ascii Research Institute, a think tank for the Japanese gaming industry. For many people who have not yet discarded the old notion that "Japanese PC games are niche," such clear data on the growth of the industry will come as a surprise.

This information comes from gaming industry analyst Dr. Serkan Toto, who highlights such significant growth by comparing data for 2021 with historical figures from the same reporter (open in new tab). Toto is a German citizen but has been based in Tokyo since 2004 and has been working as a consultant for the gaming industry with his company Kantan Games since 2013.

Toto attributes this significant growth to a storm of separate factors that have come together to form a single result. Toto cites the impact of the coronavirus blockade, the lack of PS5 consoles in Japan, the growing acceptance of foreign and indie games available inexpensively on PC, the significant increase in Japanese-made games on PC, and the availability of popular smartphone games on PC at launch. Toto also cites the improving quality of Japanese versions of games on Steam as well as local PC game storefronts.

"Not all points single-handedly set the Japanese PC gaming market on fire. I think the trend of a larger Japanese PC gaming industry will continue for the next few years."

"The Japanese PC gaming industry has been growing in size, and I think it will continue to do so for the next few years.

Valve, makers of the dominant mega-platform Steam, certainly have their eggs in that basket. They recently reported that Steam's growth rate in Japan is very high, and they even put on a mascot at the Tokyo Game Show (opens in new tab) and made a big show of it (opens in new tab). (opens in new tab)

And if the name of the lab company above sounds familiar, that's because it's a subsidiary of Japanese media giant Kadokawa, which also owns part of From Software, the developer of Eldenring, RPGMaker (and other Japanese origin), which is a subsidiary of the Japanese media giant Kadokawa. (And a whole bunch of other things that originated in Japan.)[15