As I was strolling around recently in a large commercial complex of a big city in Japan, I ended up in an electronics store (franchise found all over the place). This is the kind of store that sells everything under the sun, from TVs to fridges and air conditionning units, and of course regular computers, including gaming focused ones. I usually don’t shop there. Things are overpriced compared to what you can find online these days. But it’s still nice to step in and just look at the recent stuff they make - there are some good surprises now and then.

This time something was different though. There was now a whole area dedicated to Portable PC Gaming. We are clearly in a new era when things reach mainstream stores like that.

A New Gaming Category

It was not a huge corner, but it was certainly visible, just in front of the Apple area which usually draws people. I know you were expecting me to mention the Steam Deck. But nope, it’s not there this time, probably because of a lack of partnership with Komodo in the first place (the Edion chain typically sells the Steam Deck in Japan, but this was not an Edion store). Instead, here, you have the usual gang, ASUS with the ROG Ally, Lenovo with the Legion Go, and MSI with their Intel-based device. Together on the same booth.

There were units for each device in demonstration. A fairly standard thing in Japan, since most people don’t destroy stuff or try to steal what’s available to try out. So far, so good right? People will be able to judge for themselves and understand that it’s way better than a regular Switch! Not so fast. As you can imagine, each of these devices only run Windows, and worse, their own layer on top of it, which makes the experience inconsistent from one device to the next, and confusing to say the least. The store had no way to fix that. However, you still want them to make a sales pitch. This is where things get worse.

Disorganized and unprofessional

The problem is… someone forgot to put games that were worth looking at. You know, when Nintendo wants to sell more Switch consoles, they tend to put some effort to showcase some of their greatest games on the device. Here, only a few games were available on each device - some of them did not launch because the devices were not online (well done whoever prepared this without testing anything), and for the ones that worked, those were super cheaply made Japanese (or Chinese?) titles that did not showcase at all the power of such pricey little consoles.

For reference, this kind of hardware sells between 3x and 4x the price of a little Switch console in Japan, so you’d think they would try to make a convincing argument for gamers to shell that much out.

Nope, it’s as half-assed as you’d expect.

My guess is this is typical corporate incompetence showing up in real life. Some manager or director, somewhere, decided that there’s a market trend related to PC Gaming (and that’s exactly right) and that it could be good to surf the wave to generate extra revenues in stores. Not a bad call.

Next, this was delegated to a clueless middle-manager who went to partner with the existing manufacturers, MSI, Lenovo and ASUS to create booths for that purpose. They hired artists to design the booths. They probably spent several months working on it, ordering presentation material, fliers, and other things to ship them to every single store of the franchise in Japan. And somehow the execution stopped there. There was no discussion about showcasing actual games that people want, or if there was, it was between people who were completely clueless about PC gaming in the first place, because PC gaming is not mainstream in Japan. Consoles are.

And you end up with this. Someone dropshipped a monolith in-store. Unwilling store managers had to spend time setting it up according to the HQ instructions. Everything was done according to a neat little checklist devised far away in a cubicle. From the start to the end of the process, nobody realized that this was a big clusterfuck with absolutely no attention to detail whatsoever. If you don’t showcase games that would interest potential buyers, what are you actually doing?

Such incompetence makes Valve and Komodo look like geniuses with their launch event in Japan with real, good games to play in-store. Even though it was far, far from perfect either (some games requiring online connection, not working on the demo stage, for example).

A turning tide?

Since there’s no hard data floating around, it’s difficult to say how well the Portable PC Gaming scene is doing in Japan. I can say with confidence that it’s growing, but growing from zero is not a hard achievement. Companies are investing in it, stores are investing in it, so there’s some expectations that this is a going to be a growing category from there on. Japan loves portables devices too, so it’s a market that is more likely to pick up that kind of hardware in the first place.

I went to look for some piece of data in the Japanese media, and my search resulted in finding some market data from the time when the ROG Ally launched. Since Japan retail stores tracked at that time this new hardware in the “notebooks” category, there was a large spike in ASUS’ market share in the week following the ROG Ally launch.

The ROG Ally seems to be the strongest contender to win the Portable PC Gaming market in Japan. Numerous articles point to it first when discussing alternatives to the Switch, and the electronics store chain BIC CAMERA lists the ROG Ally as being the best models sold in this new category in the past week:

I also checked Google Trends for web search, and the Steam Deck was the king up until now in Japan, but things may be changing with the recent release of the ROG Ally X.

The Youtube search interest results look a bit different. It’s a younger audience in general, so this may be a good outlook as to where the market may be shifting in the near future - and here, the ROG Ally is clearly stepping up.

In any case, MSI and Lenovo are hardly present, mind-share wise, on the portable PC gaming market in Japan.

In summary, a growing market, while we lack real numbers, a lot of competitors but mainly two major players right now: Valve and ASUS. The Switch 2 will be announced sometimes soon, and things may change very quickly in Japan once Nintendo enters the market with a more powerful handheld device.

Predicting the future in that context will prove to be difficult for now.