Gaming market size in Japan 2019-2023
The video game market in Japan was estimated at 1.86 trillion Japanese yen in 2023. The market size, which in this case encompasses home console games, PC games, and mobile games, but does not include hardware, showed steady growth in recent years.
The Japanese video game market
As a breakdown of the market by segment shows, mobile games constitute the largest part of the market. Mobile gaming became more popular in tandem with the spread of smartphones and tablets during the 2010s. Survey figures show that smartphones are the most commonly used gaming devices in Japan today. The Japanese mobile gaming market is characterized by the ongoing success of several long-running titles, such as “Puzzle & Dragons” (2012), “Monster Strike” (2013), and "Fate/Grand Order" (2015). In the area of gaming consoles, Nintendo and Sony clearly dominate their home market. Ever since the release of the first Xbox in the early 2000s, Microsoft had problems gaining significant market shares.
PC and online gaming as recent trends
One recent trend in the Japanese video game market is the strong growth of PC gaming, which can be attributed to various factors, such as the high demand for home entertainment during the Covid-19 pandemic, the increasing acceptance of online distribution platforms such as Steam and the Epic Games Store, the growing availability of successful Japanese titles on PC, and the possibility of using handheld PC gaming devices, such as Valve’s Steam Deck, which was released in August 2022. Another trend is the growing amount of time people spend on online games. Online gaming is dominated by smartphone and tablet games, with native apps playing a much bigger role than web games. The average online gaming time increased noticeably during the Covid-19 years and stayed on an elevated level afterwards.
