Source: TECHINASIA
According to a new report, Japan’s domestic smartphone gaming market was worth JPY 546.8 billion (US$5.4 billion) in 2013, up a staggering 178 percent from 2012. The report comes from CyberZ, a subsidiary of Tokyo-based internet conglomerate CyberAgent (TYO:4751). What’s interesting about the new figures is that the smartphone gaming sector has now reached roughly half the value of the overall Japanese gaming industry, which is sized at JPY 1.1 trillion yen (US$10.8 billion) in 2013. Observe how that ratio increased from less than 30 percent a year earlier:
The reason why CyberZ focuses on smartphones in particular is that Japan is the only country in the world that still has a big feature phone game industry: Japan’s Mobile Content Forum (MCF) last year said that the feature phone gaming industry by itself was still worth US$2.4 billion in 2012. By way of comparison, MCF estimated a size of US$2.7 billion for Japan’s smartphone game market in 2012, while the chart above, at roughly US$3 billion, lands in the same ballpark for that year.
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The reason why CyberZ focuses on smartphones in particular is that Japan is the only country in the world that still has a big feature phone game industry: Japan’s Mobile Content Forum (MCF) last year said that the feature phone gaming industry by itself was still worth US$2.4 billion in 2012. By way of comparison, MCF estimated a size of US$2.7 billion for Japan’s smartphone game market in 2012, while the chart above, at roughly US$3 billion, lands in the same ballpark for that year.
