PC gaming is accelerating rapidly in Japan, offering Microsoft a unique opportunity to swoop in and capture more of this uptick with its PC Game Pass subscription service.
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According to new data from Japanese trade organization CESA, the PC games market is growing at a substantial rate in the overseas region. As per analyst Dr. Serkan Toto of Kantan Games, the data shows that PC game software sales revenues have nearly tripled from 2019 – 2023, ranging from 82 billion yen ($551 million) in 2019 to 236.4 million yen ($1.589 billion) in 2023.
This represents an increase of 187% in revenues, and a CAGR of 23.5% across the five-year period. Comparatively, PC game sales revenues went from 5% of total software earnings in 2019 to a whopping 13% of the total in 2023–a big jump for Japan.
As more gamers opt to spend on PC, this market jump has offered Microsoft a window to grab a portion of this spending growth via the PC fork of Xbox Game Pass. The exact adoption rate of subscription-oriented gaming varies by region to region, and Japanese gamers may typically opt to actually buy and own their software rather than buy into the lease-by-month subscription model. But the value and content offering has apparently been substantial enough for Xbox to sway Japanese users to buy into PC Game Pass.
In 2023, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer has confirmed that Xbox Game Pass PC subscribers in Japan had quadrupled at the time.
“Xbox Game Pass has an important meaning on Xbox. In particular, the growth of PC Game Pass is remarkable. The size of the Japanese PC game market has roughly doubled in the past three years, but the number of PC Game Pass users has quadrupled. Game Pass is growing faster than the market, which is great for the Xbox brand as a whole.”
Spencer also announced that the company is seeing big numbers in Asia–which of course includes many other regions outside of Japan.
“We’re continuing to see growth in the region. This year, more people are playing with Xbox, across all devices in Asia, than ever before. We’ve seen the largest number of Xbox console players in the region to date,” Spencer said at Tokyo Game Show 2024.
Microsoft has been trying to break into the Japanese games market for a while now, securing more partnerships with big publishers like Square Enix.
Consoles are a different story, though. Xbox console gaming represents a very small number of users in Japan.
