That sounds a bit surprising to me because I thought it was the opposite, that it increased compared to the past where it was almost non existent. With all the japanese studios now porting games to PC etc... which didn't use to be a thing before.
Just curious, one of the few reasons to play on PC in Japan over consoles is access to visual novel games consoles don't allow. Have tablets and smartphones made any in-roads to those markets over time?
not surprising, PCMR still think PC gaming is "growing" in Japan lmao.
And most japanese play freemium games, they dont buy games on PC unless the specific ones.
How the f does PC gaming "grows" while its way larger than a normal console, and crazy ass GPU prices xD
It's inevitable , if your population is decreasing by almost 1% every year , getting much older and there is pretty much no chance of it being reversed then the market must contract.
More like PC market shrunk a bit in Japan, but PC gaming is doing better than ever.
These things are always conflated.
Writer of the article knows what they're doing.
Instead of saying that PC gaming had a weird peak in 2015 (for whatever reasons), they're saying it shrunk.
While technically correct, the PC market over there has been incredibly stable for the past decade. 14-16m every friggin year with spending only pointing upwards.
It's like saying "PlayStations gaming population shrunk by 40m over the past 20 years" because they peaked with PS2 back then.
So do you agree with Famitsu or not? You're just guessing based on your own feelings with nothing to dispute the data presented by them.
Bro, are you imagining these people saying Sony consoles sell well in Japan?
The confusion is due to a clickbaity and misleading title in the OT and linked article, probably due to anti-PC fanboyism.
According to the
source research of the article posted in the OP (Famitsu Game White Book 2025, made every year by the Kadokawa ASCII Research Institute) , the PC userbase decreased a bit in these 10 years (almost 3M), but the PC game revenue generated hugely grew instead during that same period multiplying its size multiple times.
It also says that the Japanese physical game sales only represents 4.67% of the total game revenue (not counting hardware or subs) and the digital console game sales highly grew starting 2020 (covid lockdowns + the year PS5 was released).
Some of the data from the research:
Amount of Japanese users (not mutually exclusive, people can be counted in 2 or 3 groups) aged between 5 and 59 years old:
- Mobile
- 14.11M (2015)
- 42.77M (2025)
- Mobile won 28.66M users in the last 10 years
- Console
- 26.12M (2015)
- 29.51M (2025)
- Console won 3.39M users in the last 10 years
- PC
- 17.49M (2015)
- 14.52M (2025)
- PC lost 2.97M users in the last 10 years
- Total
- 48,55 (2015)
- 54.7M (2025)
- The total Japanese gaming userbase aged between 5 and 59 increased in 6.15M users in the last 10 years
Graph with evolution of the Japanese gaming market revenue (numbers are milllions of yens):
- Orange: mobile gaming revenue (smartphones & tablets)
- Blue: PC revenue
- Green: Online console revenue
- Pink: Physical console revenue
The pink part is the one covered every week in the Japanese game sales ranking: only covers a 4.67% of the total Japanese game revenue (not including hardware or subs) and 29.25% of the console game revenue.
We see a clear impact of the PS5 in the graph, which mimics its worldwide numbers: the green part (digital revenue from console games) sees a big peak in 2020 then goes back to normal, stays stable more or less a couple years and then grows in 2023 and 2024, while at the same time the console physical game sales revenue decreased specially in 2023 and 2024. A behavior very different of the Switch one. See the PS5 and Switch worldwide revenue numbers:
PS5 generates way more game revenue than, but digitally and specially via addons. Console physical games revenue is now a very small portion of the console game revenue, but in that portion Switchs generates more than PS.
The research quoted in the OP says the same than CESA and Newzoo, in fact pretty likely they all the same source: the yearly edition of the Famitsu Game White Book, made by the Kadokawa ASCII Research Institute.
Japanese PC game revenue multiplied in size several times in the last 10 years despite having decreased from 17.49M to 14.52M users (almost 3M) in this period.
