I wonder how much Steams efforts played into this. The Steam Deck launch in Japan was a big deal (at least for me), but didn’t sounded like a huge success. They even got a Steam Pal mascot, because Valve thought this is a Japanese thing. This never got a global marketing thing sadly, wish Steam Pal became their mascot and dedicated game (or licensed to others)… I digress.

They also love handhelds, but unfortunately the Steam Deck is a big huge, it wasn’t available and there was not a huge marketing. And now with those prices its hopeless anyway. What PC games are the most popular in Japan? Steam has https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topsellers/JP/ listing, but that doesn’t show the non Steam games (obviously).