“Japan Has The Biggest Growth Rate For PC Gaming,” Says Valve

Seven months after its launch, the Steam Deck has been a monumental achievement for Valve. With consistent support from Valve months after its launch in order to fix any issues that pop up, the Steam Deck has become a must-own console for both newcomers to PC gaming as well as people familiar with PC gaming.

In a recent interview conducted by Automaton Media of Valve’s Erik Peterson and Lawrence Yang, it was mentioned that the Steam Deck has been a great success in Japan. While no official sales numbers were given, it seems Valve is overall very pleased with the sales of the Steam Deck. 

Major Takeaways:

• Steam Deck Pre-orders exceed Valve expectations.
• Valve sees huge potential in the Japanese market for the Steam Deck.
• Next Steam Deck is “a long way off”.

 According to Valve’s business development executive Erik Peterson, Steam Deck pre-orders in Japan are “better than originally expected”. When talking about the reasons for the Steam Deck’s success, he had this to say,

There is no doubt that home game consoles are dominant in Japan, but the size of the PC game market is probably bigger than you think. It is in the top 10 in the world in terms of market size, and in terms of growth rate, it is even the best potential in the world. That’s how fast the Japanese PC gaming scene is growing now. This is the first reason.

The second reason is that Japan is the hometown of portable game consoles. Portable gaming was born in Japan and has been a concept that has flown to the world. It is a natural idea for us to deliver the Steam Deck, which is the forerunner of portable PC gaming devices, to everyone in Japan, which is the origin of portable gaming.”

Based on this statement it’s apparent that Valve is doubling down on its efforts to market itself to the Japanese market. Especially during a time when this sort of niche is largely untapped by most gaming or tech companies except for Nintendo. 

While this may not sound like a huge deal to those unfamiliar with the Japanese market, home consoles and handheld devices have always dominated the gaming space in Japan as a vast majority tend to avoid gaming PCs for their relative inaccessibility.

Recently however the trends are starting to shift with a greater focus and increase in interest in PC gaming by the Japanese market. So, a handheld like the Deck which merges both PC gaming and handheld gaming in one easily accessible package satisfies an extremely profitable niche in the market. 

UX designer Lawrence Yang also brought up the possibility of a new version or the next Steam Deck saying that he has been “thinking little by little” about the next Steam Deck project and also mentioning that it will be “a long way off“.

The Steam Deck also continues to be a huge success in the west as it has topped the Steam charts for multiple weeks in a row surpassing many other top-selling titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man.