Japan's mobile market struggles could be explained by it's rising PC market

This post is a response to this post about Japan's mobile game industry, where many comments assume the quality of Japanese games is one of the larger reasons why the Japanese mobile game market is failing. While there could be points made about Japan mobile game quality, what is not talked about as often is how fast the Japanese PC market is growing. This is despite Japan's PC gaming population decreasing by 3 million users in the last decade, it's market has nearly tripled at the same time from 2019 to 2023.

The Japanese PC market has seen constant year-on-year growth since 2018, according to gaming market research firm Newzoo: in yen, the period 2018-2021 saw PC revenue growth leap up 12%, from ¥95 billion to ¥135 billion. 2021 to 2024 saw a 21.4% growth from ¥134 billion to ¥240 billion. Though this exponential growth has slowed as the Switch 2 is rebounding the console market in Japan, the PC market has still grown by 5.8% in 2025 from 2024, compared to mobile gaming 1.3% in the same period.

Even Japanese mobile developers have took notice. Umamusume: Pretty Derby released a dedicated Steam PC port in 2025, along with the newly released Hololive Dreams having a Steam version on release.

Japanese PC gamers and developer has also diverged from the larger Japanese gaming market, seeing a diverse genre share where PvP shooters, indie games, progression based games are seeing a surge in popularity away from strong domestic IPs. Gacha games such as Genshin Impact also see strong numbers on the PC platform.

Source: Newzoo

Japanese indie developers have also made a strong presence on PC both domestically and internationally, with popular hits such as Exit 8, Palworld and MECCHA CHAMELEON.

While mobile gaming continues to be the giant of the Japanese market, PC gaming is gaining massive ground and is allowing foreign developers (such as HoYoGames and other gacha studios) and indies to make an impression.