Disclaimer: there are times when I just make guesses and what I am talking about is not based off facts but rather they are more based off assumptions (there I said it) and a decent portion of this you could easily find your self. Not everything that you will find here is useful information and some of it is just me mumbling on about stuff that goes no where.
Story Time
A long time ago in a place called Nippon,people use to play games on computers and then they stooped, the end.
(I can not find the source now but I recall hearing how there is a sort of small Museum that they have in Japan for old 70s/80s PC games and the reason behind this is to preserve the games since they simply can not be played anymore, failing PCs and games )
pre-2000 there were a number of Japanese games that were made for Japanese consumer computers and in fact there were a number of Japanese companies that have origins in making PC games such as Square Enix (Square Soft, Enix), Nihon Falcom Koei Tecmo (Koei has been making sexually suggestive games since the 80s and are among one of the first companies to make Eroges). These companies main output would shift from PC to console and they would release a number of titles on the Family Computer (NES). Out of these companies Nihon Falcom would be the only one to stick to mainly PC before making the complete shift to PC. Did you know that Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were inspired by Wizardry and Ultima?
Devs moved from PC to console and some new comers would make their home on PC, this new comer were groups of hobbits that would make doujin game (think of them as indie devs but with a different mind set,) VNs and bullet hell shooters would among 2 of the genres that doujin circles would work on
From the 80s to the early 2000s you would still see Japanese titles making their way to PC in the form of ports (FFVII,FFVIII,Bio Hazard, Silent Hill 2, ). This was one the PS1 was still around but once the PS2 came around the amount of PC ports would pretty much halt and only a very small number of companies would release on PC, two of those being Capcom and Nihon Falcom.
Around 2007 there were a number of gaming industry leaders that were saying PC gaming was dead and that piracy was the reason for it, you did have the western branch of Capcom pushing to still keep releasing titles on PC. Microsoft launched Games for Windows Live in 2007 and Capcom's titles would make use of that service. Bandai would also release some titles that made use of GWL such as Dark Souls and ACAH. As far as the west in concerned if you want to play JRPGs then you will not find many of those on PC in the west. With the popularity of Steam and with the rise of fear of GWL shutting down for good, devs/publishers jumped over to Steam. By 2014 Capcom, Bandai, and SE were using Steam to deliver games to customers. In 2012 Steam in general was not that well known in Japan and those that did know it were mostly PC gamers in Japan that have been playing Valve games for years (8-4, a company that specialized in localizing games from Japanese to English, mentioned this in an interview how in 2012 Steam was not that well known). By 2014 more titles were making their way to PC via Steam, one of the more notable titles being Valkyria Chronicles which prior to the Steam release was a disc only titles for the Sony PlayStation 3 home console and did not have a digital version available for purchase.
In PC gaming was still around but it was mainly western fps games, VN titles, Doujin work or . PC gaming in Japan is a lot more expensive compared to the rest of the world not only because how hardware prices in Japan can be twice that of the US (parts that you can buy in the US for about $1,000 USD can cost you almost $2,000 USD in Japan, since those parts have to be imported and the demand is not as high compared to other parts of the world. Japan even has a second hand market where you will see stores selling used PC parts next to new ones but the price difference is not that large, so it doesn't really make a difference price wise of buying new vs used) but also games can be prices as well with Visual Novels easily costing you over $80USD.
2014 and onward would be a time when more Japanese developers and publishers start to use PC gaming (Steam) as a means to further expand their audience. As it stands no,w major companies like Capcom and SEGA have expressed a great interest in PC and have stated that they plan to continue supporting the platform in the future. Sales have been great overall and depending on the title can sell as much as 3+ million copies on PC and on the lower end something close to 70k copies for more niche titles. Action titles like Dark Souls (each one selling 3 million+), Sekiro (2 million copies sold??), Nier Automata (over 1 million copies) and Monster Hunter World (3 million copies?) have sold much better compared to turn base JRPGs with sell 500k copies at most, Fighting games are niche and the most they can seem to sell is around 500k copies (Tekken 7, Dragonball Z FighterZ)
With the help of Steam some publishers like KT and Iffy are able to deliver their niche titles to places like China, this is one of the reasons why a lot of Japanese titles have Chinese as one of their supported Languages. China is a large market and there is an interest there for Japanese titles. SE adding Chinese support to Octopath Traveler to go along side it's Steam release was not a coincidence (N/S also got the update) and it seems to have payed off. Following the release of OT the game was a top seller both in the NA top sellers and the world wide top sellers, the game would eventually drop off the NA top sellers but would remain a part of the world wide sellers. China is part of the world wide sellers, if you look at Steam reviews more than half of the total Steam reviews are in Chinese.
Some data from an indie Japanese title showed that of the sales for the game, a majority of those sales came from China and then followed by Japan and then finally the rest of the world. Japanese users only make up about 1.1% of total Steam users. This information is from around 2017/2018 I think so percentage may be smaller now since Steam users in China keeps growing but there should still be a few million Steam users in Japan
VNs were one of the genres that to this day is still popular on PC in Japan, you will see games that were originally Eroge titles getting ported to consoles and stripped of their original Erotic material, some of these titles have been localized for the west and released on Steam. Prior to the release of the N/S a good number of Shut em ups were making their way to PC via Steam. prior to this these titles did have some popularity in arcades and on the Xbox. The Xbox One did not sell that well and arcades not being what they use to be resulted in shoot'em ups not really having a place to go to. So those are now on Steam and N/S. Touhou (one of the more well known early doujin titles) is now on Steam (in addition to other fan titles based of the series).
PC is not very popular in Japan and is niche, but in recent years it has grown in popularity, Esports is one of the reason for this. Esports are not "new" and have been around the world for a number of years, Japan has had a competitive scene for years, with fighting games being among one of the more popular genres. In 2018 new laws were passed that allowed for the formation of Japan Esports Union (JESU), this made it possible for people to get licenses to take part in larger tournaments. There are still smaller scale tournaments being held like with SEGA's Puyo Puyo eSports game, which has tournaments in some shopping centers. As of right now the big prize money is for PC oriented games, of the popular titles Call of Duty was the only FPS game for consoles and those tournaments are held by Sony. Games like Overwatch and Rainbow Six Seige (R6S is quite popular in Japan) don't have tournaments for the console versions (technically Ubisoft is holding a tournament of R6S on PS4 but the main events are still for the PC version in Japan). Culture wise it would seem as if people from Japan would like to not have to rely (communicate?) with other players in a competitive nature, it's sort of weird but in general the more popular esports titles are 1 v 1 style types of games (which are fighting games but would also include card games as like like Cygames Shadowverse)
Vitrual Youtubers (V-tubers) have grown in popularity with Kizuna A.I. being the most popular one you will see that a number of V-tubers actually play on PC (if a game is multiplatform) which can influence people to also pick up said game on said platform. As a tie in to V-tubers you have VR chat (live out your weeb fantasies) which is popular with the VR crowd in Japan (people do buy and sell VR avatars for the game in Japan, some of the reason for this is because of cultural/legal reasons people have issue with copyrighted materiel ). If you want these types of experience you would have needed to buy a gaming PC, but now with the release of the Oculus Quest some of this may change a bit (mainly VR chat).
PC gaming in Japan does have some issues, not every game released on PC supports Japanese (there are some dedicated fans that do fan translations for some games and I have seen some western indie devs even mention this). Even if there is a Japanese translation for a game it does not guarantee that the game will have Japanese support. There are games on Steam that were released in Japan but do not have Japanese subtitles but still do have the Japanese VA. There are also some publishers that region block certain games (this could be due to licensing issues). Dragon Quest is one of the most popular franchise in Japan and even though there is a PC of Dragon Quest X (this was never made it to the west), DQXI would not be made available for PC in Japan. Some games based of licencesed anime IPs are also not available for purchase in Japan. SEGA EU is a big supporter of PC gaming and while games like Yakuza do support Japanese, SEGA EUs own titles do not. SEGA EU did accidentally put Catherine for sale for Japanese players at the price of $100USD but later changed that and region blocked the game. At launch the PC version of Valkyria Chronicles 4 did not have Japanese support but later on would, the catch is that Japanese support would only be available to those that purchased the game directly from Steam, if you had activated the game via a Steam key you would not get Japanese subtitles
Marketing wise the PC version of Japanese titles are now advertised in Japan (sort of), in promotional material you will see the mention of a Steam version in addition to a PS4 or N/S version of certain titles. Bandai does with titles like SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays and Code Vein where they advertise the PC version of the game in Japan. More and more companies acknowledge the PC version of titles and advertise them, they talk about them on Social Media (Twitter is extremely popular in Japan).
While VNs have been popular in Japan on PC the same can't be said for the west. Back when Steam was being curated Valve would reject Visual Novels since the team that did the curating did not consider them to be games. When Steam Greenlight launched some of this team also assumed that even with the changes that people would not want to see VN titles on Steam, and boy were they wrong. Not only have highly regarded Visual Novels made their way to Steam but so have Eroges. So Valve has had a troubled past with visual novels and it still has trouble with them, there have been a number of games that have been banned from Steam (I will not go to much into detail other then there have been some that were up for sale and then later removed and others that were banned and then all of a sudden just let back on).
The VN censorship leads us to censorship in general. The idea of a Japanese titles being censored for a western audience is not a new idea and something that has happened for years, But more recently companies such as Sony have been very strict about this. This is were PC gaming comes into place, there have been some titles were the western PlayStation 4 version had to be censored but the PC version did not. This could potentially mean that if devs feared being censored by Sony that they could just release for PC instead right? Not exactly PC serve more as an addition to regular consoles sales for Japanese titles and not as a replacement/competitor. Kenichiro Takaki departure from Marvelous is believed to be tied to this, Sony new policy's would be prevent Takaki from making Senran Kagura games in a certain way, and while Marvelous (Xseed) has released a majority of the Senran Kagura tiles to PC that would not help keep that IP as financially viable. The Senran Kagura teams has mentioned that not every one in Japan has a PC in their home so that would greatly reduce the audience in Japan alone. Valves policy on censorship has been weird and while there are some games that people can understand as to why Valve would ban them there are still others that have been rejected (some of which have been Japanese indie games, some of them are eroge titles). The policy does not seem to affect big name companies though and in general it seems that if Sony or Nintendo of Japan allowed it on their stores then Valve would also allow the game without any alterations. Censorship on Steam is weird and some companies have done it, Spike Chunsoft did do this for at least one title where the PC version was different than the console version released in Japan but have since gone in a different direction and no longer censor their Steam titles (I say Steam specifically since Spike Chunsoft only releases on Steam and they only sell directly on Steam and do not sell Steam keys. They are one of the only Japanese publishers that I know that do this everyone else sells Steam keys)
When it comes to PC people talk about how Steam does not have any competitors and that is not accurate. In Japan one of Steams competitors goes by the name DMM (Games). DMM has a variety of services that they provide and one of those involves selling PC games (they also have their own client) there are some games that are sold on both Steam and DMM in Japan and then there are some games where the PC version is exclusive to DMM. DMM also has a subscription service where you pay $10USD a month and get access to over 400 games. DMM also has plans to use Bluestack as a means to get mobile releases on PC and sell them on Steam (in addition to their own store?). DMM said that they are expanding and plan to sell more indie titles (both Japanese and western titles) and plan to sell to people outside of Japan as well. So has DMM "caught on"? Well no, they do have titles by Marvelous and KT and some Bethseda stuff. One of the main things that DMM has going for it PC wise is it's involvement with PUBG, and DMM has even hosted some PUBG tournaments in Japan. PUBG was actually one of the reasons that a number of people in Japan made Steam accounts (how big that number actually is, I have no idea but there were some people that used Steam for the first time because of that game ). More recently DMM has played a role in the Japanese localization and marketing of Warhorse Studios Kingdom Come: Deliverance (they even held a contest where some people could go and visit the locations that the game is based off).
Playism is among one of the biggest publishers that specializes in publishing smaller Japanese indie titles outside of Japan. They don't just publish on PC but also on console, PC just so happens where they release their titles first before releasing some of them on consoles.
It would seem that more Japanese indie devs are becoming aware of Steam since there are some titles that get released on there that are only available in Japanese and that are not region locked. Some of these titles launched as Early Access titles and have found some form of success on PC while others not so much.
You have companies like Illusion that are taking a notice as well and by that I mean they are taking a look at the western PC market (since console makers would not allow the types of games that Illusion makes....)
Big companies like Bandai Namco are now announcing the PC versions of games in Japan, before if there was a PC version it would be specifically for the west. Bandai still has to deal with licensing issues so not everything gets a Japanese PC release.
South East Asia is important, PC is very popular in that region. Previously KT had released Free to Play Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation exclusively on DMM in Japan (they even did a whole promotional thing when announcing the title with DMM) and now the title is available on Steam in English, Japanese, Korean, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. This game is region locked (I'm in the US) and despite that the game does have an average of over 3k concurrent players. Yes it's free to play and it's player base has shrunk by 50% from the initial release but people are still playing. Correction it would seem that it peeks at 3k every Wednesday (I'm guessing that's a in game event thing?) and then goes to about 1k every other day, with Sunday being it's lowest day. Despite not being available in the west and being a PC only thing, this game does have things like an official Facebook page and website that are in English.
A while ago Tim Sweeney made a statement about how not every PC gamer has Steam installed on their PC (or something along those line) and that is true not every PC gamer in Japan uses Steam. World of Warships is popular in Japan, the game has it's own client (it is also available on Steam as well) and in Japan the game has actually had some unique promotions where the World of Warships company held events to show off the collaboration with Azure Lane (a mobile game with anime waifus designed as war ships ). As I mentioned before things like twitter are very popular in Japan and are a useful means to share information which includes pictures of your PC gaming set up. I did look at a number of these pictures and noticed that Steam was nowhere to be found for some of these users (people typically have Steam pinned to their task bar or at least have a short cut for it on their desktop) but instead you did see things like Fortnite (EGS Launcher), Battlenet, Minecraft. There are also web broswer games so you would not even need Steam in order to play those. PCs of course are also used for content creation as well (is that where we get all of those anime waifu fan art made?) so individuals that do that would have a PC and maybe edit stuff on there PC and then just play games on their PS4 or N/S. So even though some people do have a PC it's not always used for gaming but for other purposed instead, I was curious about what this one mangaka (I can't recall their name) meant when they said that they only used their PC to draw and didn't want to play games on it. I was always under the impression that maybe they didn't play games on their PC (even though they said playing games is one of the things that they like to do in their free time) because they were afraid that it would break or something and their livelihood depends on them being able to draw, maybe there is another reason?
There also seems to be a pattern with PC users in Japan putting figures inside of their PCs, I guess that tampered glass does have some purpose after all.
There also appears to be some distrust between some PC players in Japan with the Epic Game Store and Tencent. In the west there was this whole thing going around where people believed that Tencent was spying on them with the EGS and there are some that also think that in Japan and would rather not install the EGS if at all possible (on the Japanese site that I visit it was typically articles that involved EGS and exclusivity that got the most community participation, the Shenmue 3 articles in particular). Just like I mentioned that there are some people that do not have Steam installed on their PC there are also those that don't have the EGS installed on their PC.
saved for later
Story Time
A long time ago in a place called Nippon,people use to play games on computers and then they stooped, the end.
(I can not find the source now but I recall hearing how there is a sort of small Museum that they have in Japan for old 70s/80s PC games and the reason behind this is to preserve the games since they simply can not be played anymore, failing PCs and games )
pre-2000 there were a number of Japanese games that were made for Japanese consumer computers and in fact there were a number of Japanese companies that have origins in making PC games such as Square Enix (Square Soft, Enix), Nihon Falcom Koei Tecmo (Koei has been making sexually suggestive games since the 80s and are among one of the first companies to make Eroges). These companies main output would shift from PC to console and they would release a number of titles on the Family Computer (NES). Out of these companies Nihon Falcom would be the only one to stick to mainly PC before making the complete shift to PC. Did you know that Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were inspired by Wizardry and Ultima?
Devs moved from PC to console and some new comers would make their home on PC, this new comer were groups of hobbits that would make doujin game (think of them as indie devs but with a different mind set,) VNs and bullet hell shooters would among 2 of the genres that doujin circles would work on
From the 80s to the early 2000s you would still see Japanese titles making their way to PC in the form of ports (FFVII,FFVIII,Bio Hazard, Silent Hill 2, ). This was one the PS1 was still around but once the PS2 came around the amount of PC ports would pretty much halt and only a very small number of companies would release on PC, two of those being Capcom and Nihon Falcom.
Around 2007 there were a number of gaming industry leaders that were saying PC gaming was dead and that piracy was the reason for it, you did have the western branch of Capcom pushing to still keep releasing titles on PC. Microsoft launched Games for Windows Live in 2007 and Capcom's titles would make use of that service. Bandai would also release some titles that made use of GWL such as Dark Souls and ACAH. As far as the west in concerned if you want to play JRPGs then you will not find many of those on PC in the west. With the popularity of Steam and with the rise of fear of GWL shutting down for good, devs/publishers jumped over to Steam. By 2014 Capcom, Bandai, and SE were using Steam to deliver games to customers. In 2012 Steam in general was not that well known in Japan and those that did know it were mostly PC gamers in Japan that have been playing Valve games for years (8-4, a company that specialized in localizing games from Japanese to English, mentioned this in an interview how in 2012 Steam was not that well known). By 2014 more titles were making their way to PC via Steam, one of the more notable titles being Valkyria Chronicles which prior to the Steam release was a disc only titles for the Sony PlayStation 3 home console and did not have a digital version available for purchase.
In PC gaming was still around but it was mainly western fps games, VN titles, Doujin work or . PC gaming in Japan is a lot more expensive compared to the rest of the world not only because how hardware prices in Japan can be twice that of the US (parts that you can buy in the US for about $1,000 USD can cost you almost $2,000 USD in Japan, since those parts have to be imported and the demand is not as high compared to other parts of the world. Japan even has a second hand market where you will see stores selling used PC parts next to new ones but the price difference is not that large, so it doesn't really make a difference price wise of buying new vs used) but also games can be prices as well with Visual Novels easily costing you over $80USD.
2014 and onward would be a time when more Japanese developers and publishers start to use PC gaming (Steam) as a means to further expand their audience. As it stands no,w major companies like Capcom and SEGA have expressed a great interest in PC and have stated that they plan to continue supporting the platform in the future. Sales have been great overall and depending on the title can sell as much as 3+ million copies on PC and on the lower end something close to 70k copies for more niche titles. Action titles like Dark Souls (each one selling 3 million+), Sekiro (2 million copies sold??), Nier Automata (over 1 million copies) and Monster Hunter World (3 million copies?) have sold much better compared to turn base JRPGs with sell 500k copies at most, Fighting games are niche and the most they can seem to sell is around 500k copies (Tekken 7, Dragonball Z FighterZ)
With the help of Steam some publishers like KT and Iffy are able to deliver their niche titles to places like China, this is one of the reasons why a lot of Japanese titles have Chinese as one of their supported Languages. China is a large market and there is an interest there for Japanese titles. SE adding Chinese support to Octopath Traveler to go along side it's Steam release was not a coincidence (N/S also got the update) and it seems to have payed off. Following the release of OT the game was a top seller both in the NA top sellers and the world wide top sellers, the game would eventually drop off the NA top sellers but would remain a part of the world wide sellers. China is part of the world wide sellers, if you look at Steam reviews more than half of the total Steam reviews are in Chinese.
Some data from an indie Japanese title showed that of the sales for the game, a majority of those sales came from China and then followed by Japan and then finally the rest of the world. Japanese users only make up about 1.1% of total Steam users. This information is from around 2017/2018 I think so percentage may be smaller now since Steam users in China keeps growing but there should still be a few million Steam users in Japan
VNs were one of the genres that to this day is still popular on PC in Japan, you will see games that were originally Eroge titles getting ported to consoles and stripped of their original Erotic material, some of these titles have been localized for the west and released on Steam. Prior to the release of the N/S a good number of Shut em ups were making their way to PC via Steam. prior to this these titles did have some popularity in arcades and on the Xbox. The Xbox One did not sell that well and arcades not being what they use to be resulted in shoot'em ups not really having a place to go to. So those are now on Steam and N/S. Touhou (one of the more well known early doujin titles) is now on Steam (in addition to other fan titles based of the series).
PC is not very popular in Japan and is niche, but in recent years it has grown in popularity, Esports is one of the reason for this. Esports are not "new" and have been around the world for a number of years, Japan has had a competitive scene for years, with fighting games being among one of the more popular genres. In 2018 new laws were passed that allowed for the formation of Japan Esports Union (JESU), this made it possible for people to get licenses to take part in larger tournaments. There are still smaller scale tournaments being held like with SEGA's Puyo Puyo eSports game, which has tournaments in some shopping centers. As of right now the big prize money is for PC oriented games, of the popular titles Call of Duty was the only FPS game for consoles and those tournaments are held by Sony. Games like Overwatch and Rainbow Six Seige (R6S is quite popular in Japan) don't have tournaments for the console versions (technically Ubisoft is holding a tournament of R6S on PS4 but the main events are still for the PC version in Japan). Culture wise it would seem as if people from Japan would like to not have to rely (communicate?) with other players in a competitive nature, it's sort of weird but in general the more popular esports titles are 1 v 1 style types of games (which are fighting games but would also include card games as like like Cygames Shadowverse)
Vitrual Youtubers (V-tubers) have grown in popularity with Kizuna A.I. being the most popular one you will see that a number of V-tubers actually play on PC (if a game is multiplatform) which can influence people to also pick up said game on said platform. As a tie in to V-tubers you have VR chat (live out your weeb fantasies) which is popular with the VR crowd in Japan (people do buy and sell VR avatars for the game in Japan, some of the reason for this is because of cultural/legal reasons people have issue with copyrighted materiel ). If you want these types of experience you would have needed to buy a gaming PC, but now with the release of the Oculus Quest some of this may change a bit (mainly VR chat).
PC gaming in Japan does have some issues, not every game released on PC supports Japanese (there are some dedicated fans that do fan translations for some games and I have seen some western indie devs even mention this). Even if there is a Japanese translation for a game it does not guarantee that the game will have Japanese support. There are games on Steam that were released in Japan but do not have Japanese subtitles but still do have the Japanese VA. There are also some publishers that region block certain games (this could be due to licensing issues). Dragon Quest is one of the most popular franchise in Japan and even though there is a PC of Dragon Quest X (this was never made it to the west), DQXI would not be made available for PC in Japan. Some games based of licencesed anime IPs are also not available for purchase in Japan. SEGA EU is a big supporter of PC gaming and while games like Yakuza do support Japanese, SEGA EUs own titles do not. SEGA EU did accidentally put Catherine for sale for Japanese players at the price of $100USD but later changed that and region blocked the game. At launch the PC version of Valkyria Chronicles 4 did not have Japanese support but later on would, the catch is that Japanese support would only be available to those that purchased the game directly from Steam, if you had activated the game via a Steam key you would not get Japanese subtitles
Marketing wise the PC version of Japanese titles are now advertised in Japan (sort of), in promotional material you will see the mention of a Steam version in addition to a PS4 or N/S version of certain titles. Bandai does with titles like SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays and Code Vein where they advertise the PC version of the game in Japan. More and more companies acknowledge the PC version of titles and advertise them, they talk about them on Social Media (Twitter is extremely popular in Japan).
While VNs have been popular in Japan on PC the same can't be said for the west. Back when Steam was being curated Valve would reject Visual Novels since the team that did the curating did not consider them to be games. When Steam Greenlight launched some of this team also assumed that even with the changes that people would not want to see VN titles on Steam, and boy were they wrong. Not only have highly regarded Visual Novels made their way to Steam but so have Eroges. So Valve has had a troubled past with visual novels and it still has trouble with them, there have been a number of games that have been banned from Steam (I will not go to much into detail other then there have been some that were up for sale and then later removed and others that were banned and then all of a sudden just let back on).
The VN censorship leads us to censorship in general. The idea of a Japanese titles being censored for a western audience is not a new idea and something that has happened for years, But more recently companies such as Sony have been very strict about this. This is were PC gaming comes into place, there have been some titles were the western PlayStation 4 version had to be censored but the PC version did not. This could potentially mean that if devs feared being censored by Sony that they could just release for PC instead right? Not exactly PC serve more as an addition to regular consoles sales for Japanese titles and not as a replacement/competitor. Kenichiro Takaki departure from Marvelous is believed to be tied to this, Sony new policy's would be prevent Takaki from making Senran Kagura games in a certain way, and while Marvelous (Xseed) has released a majority of the Senran Kagura tiles to PC that would not help keep that IP as financially viable. The Senran Kagura teams has mentioned that not every one in Japan has a PC in their home so that would greatly reduce the audience in Japan alone. Valves policy on censorship has been weird and while there are some games that people can understand as to why Valve would ban them there are still others that have been rejected (some of which have been Japanese indie games, some of them are eroge titles). The policy does not seem to affect big name companies though and in general it seems that if Sony or Nintendo of Japan allowed it on their stores then Valve would also allow the game without any alterations. Censorship on Steam is weird and some companies have done it, Spike Chunsoft did do this for at least one title where the PC version was different than the console version released in Japan but have since gone in a different direction and no longer censor their Steam titles (I say Steam specifically since Spike Chunsoft only releases on Steam and they only sell directly on Steam and do not sell Steam keys. They are one of the only Japanese publishers that I know that do this everyone else sells Steam keys)
When it comes to PC people talk about how Steam does not have any competitors and that is not accurate. In Japan one of Steams competitors goes by the name DMM (Games). DMM has a variety of services that they provide and one of those involves selling PC games (they also have their own client) there are some games that are sold on both Steam and DMM in Japan and then there are some games where the PC version is exclusive to DMM. DMM also has a subscription service where you pay $10USD a month and get access to over 400 games. DMM also has plans to use Bluestack as a means to get mobile releases on PC and sell them on Steam (in addition to their own store?). DMM said that they are expanding and plan to sell more indie titles (both Japanese and western titles) and plan to sell to people outside of Japan as well. So has DMM "caught on"? Well no, they do have titles by Marvelous and KT and some Bethseda stuff. One of the main things that DMM has going for it PC wise is it's involvement with PUBG, and DMM has even hosted some PUBG tournaments in Japan. PUBG was actually one of the reasons that a number of people in Japan made Steam accounts (how big that number actually is, I have no idea but there were some people that used Steam for the first time because of that game ). More recently DMM has played a role in the Japanese localization and marketing of Warhorse Studios Kingdom Come: Deliverance (they even held a contest where some people could go and visit the locations that the game is based off).
Playism is among one of the biggest publishers that specializes in publishing smaller Japanese indie titles outside of Japan. They don't just publish on PC but also on console, PC just so happens where they release their titles first before releasing some of them on consoles.
It would seem that more Japanese indie devs are becoming aware of Steam since there are some titles that get released on there that are only available in Japanese and that are not region locked. Some of these titles launched as Early Access titles and have found some form of success on PC while others not so much.
You have companies like Illusion that are taking a notice as well and by that I mean they are taking a look at the western PC market (since console makers would not allow the types of games that Illusion makes....)
Big companies like Bandai Namco are now announcing the PC versions of games in Japan, before if there was a PC version it would be specifically for the west. Bandai still has to deal with licensing issues so not everything gets a Japanese PC release.
South East Asia is important, PC is very popular in that region. Previously KT had released Free to Play Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation exclusively on DMM in Japan (they even did a whole promotional thing when announcing the title with DMM) and now the title is available on Steam in English, Japanese, Korean, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. This game is region locked (I'm in the US) and despite that the game does have an average of over 3k concurrent players. Yes it's free to play and it's player base has shrunk by 50% from the initial release but people are still playing. Correction it would seem that it peeks at 3k every Wednesday (I'm guessing that's a in game event thing?) and then goes to about 1k every other day, with Sunday being it's lowest day. Despite not being available in the west and being a PC only thing, this game does have things like an official Facebook page and website that are in English.
A while ago Tim Sweeney made a statement about how not every PC gamer has Steam installed on their PC (or something along those line) and that is true not every PC gamer in Japan uses Steam. World of Warships is popular in Japan, the game has it's own client (it is also available on Steam as well) and in Japan the game has actually had some unique promotions where the World of Warships company held events to show off the collaboration with Azure Lane (a mobile game with anime waifus designed as war ships ). As I mentioned before things like twitter are very popular in Japan and are a useful means to share information which includes pictures of your PC gaming set up. I did look at a number of these pictures and noticed that Steam was nowhere to be found for some of these users (people typically have Steam pinned to their task bar or at least have a short cut for it on their desktop) but instead you did see things like Fortnite (EGS Launcher), Battlenet, Minecraft. There are also web broswer games so you would not even need Steam in order to play those. PCs of course are also used for content creation as well (is that where we get all of those anime waifu fan art made?) so individuals that do that would have a PC and maybe edit stuff on there PC and then just play games on their PS4 or N/S. So even though some people do have a PC it's not always used for gaming but for other purposed instead, I was curious about what this one mangaka (I can't recall their name) meant when they said that they only used their PC to draw and didn't want to play games on it. I was always under the impression that maybe they didn't play games on their PC (even though they said playing games is one of the things that they like to do in their free time) because they were afraid that it would break or something and their livelihood depends on them being able to draw, maybe there is another reason?
There also seems to be a pattern with PC users in Japan putting figures inside of their PCs, I guess that tampered glass does have some purpose after all.
There also appears to be some distrust between some PC players in Japan with the Epic Game Store and Tencent. In the west there was this whole thing going around where people believed that Tencent was spying on them with the EGS and there are some that also think that in Japan and would rather not install the EGS if at all possible (on the Japanese site that I visit it was typically articles that involved EGS and exclusivity that got the most community participation, the Shenmue 3 articles in particular). Just like I mentioned that there are some people that do not have Steam installed on their PC there are also those that don't have the EGS installed on their PC.
saved for later
