PC gaming has been becoming bigger and bigger in Japan in recent years, and the most recent statistics from Steam seem to support the trend.
According to Steam’s own “Hardware & Software Survey”, the percentage of Japanese-speaking users reached 2.82% in June 2023.
I am following these surveys for a long time, and this is a record high.
Here are the top 15 languages on Steam for last month:
So Japanese comes in at No. 6 – ahead of German or French.
(The full ranking shows some strange results, however: Arabic is at the bottom with 0.00% – which of course cannot be and puts this language even behind Bulgarian for last month.)
There is no clear reason why June in particular saw this rise in Japanese users.
The PS5 has been widely available in Japan all year, the Japanese-only PC MMORPG Blue Protocol that was launched last month is not available yet on the platform (publisher Bandai Namco uses a custom launcher), and the Steam Deck went on sale in Japan back in April already.
In any case, the trend is surely positive not only for local developers (that increasingly view the PC as an actually viable distribution platform) but also for foreign studios offering PC games in the Japanese market.
