According to Valve's March Steam Hardware and Software Survey, the number and increase in Steam users from Japan reached an all-time high.
In the past, the general understanding of the Japanese game market was that consoles such as PS4 and Switch occupied an absolute dominant position in the market, and most of the PC platform players were MMORPG and Galgame users. The results of this survey give us a new understanding of the Japanese game market.
The Steam Hardware and Software Survey is updated monthly, and according to the language data in the March survey results, English users are far ahead with 36.11%, followed by Chinese Simplified with 26.23%. Strikingly, the proportion of Japanese users reached an all-time high of 2.34%, ranking 8th among all languages, an increase of 0.45% compared with the data in February, and a monthly increase of 23.80%.
According to the analysis of Japanese media Automaton, there are many reasons for the increase in Japanese Steam users: more large games have released Steam versions, more Steam platform games have been localized in Japanese, and the purchase difficulty of hosts such as PS5 is also one of the possible reasons.
In addition, information such as "Steam セール (Steam Sale)" is also often on the hot search of Twitter in Japan, asus ROG, HP OMEN and other manufacturers often place PC ads on the platform, Japanese players can clearly feel the penetration of PC game culture in the Japanese market, this trend will continue in the future.
Automaton believes that as the number of Japanese users grows, more games will be localized in Japanese on Steam, and Steam will gradually grow into a platform that is also excellent for Japanese PC players, and can look forward to further development in the future.