@Articuno76 said:
IIRC home network internet penetration was really low in Japan which would explain why Japanese uptake on digital goods is so poor. The ratio of books that are released digitally for Kindle is quite poor compared to the English speaking world I hear, which again leads me to believe that consumer faith in digital goods isn't there. Same story with the Japanese iTunes, things you expect to be on there simply aren't; Japan is really lagging behind with digital goods.
It's perhaps not surprising though, most Japanese digital services are badly designed, difficult to navigate and packed with an obnoxious number of adverts (actually, pretty much all of the Japanese internet looks like that...). Even Vector (a personal favourite of mine) suffers from those issues.
There's a reason for that. The evolution of the internet was different in Japan than in most other countries.
In the West, as well other Asian countries like China and South Korea, the internet boom of the late 90's mainly took off on PC, with slow 56k dial-up modems, before we moved on to high-speed broadband modems in the early 2000's.
In Japan, something different happened: the release of i-Mode, the world's first 3G mobile internet service, in the late 90's, led to Japanese mobile phone users having high-speed internet on their phones, a lot faster than the 56K dial-up modems most of us used on PC back then. At around the same time, colour flip-phones also became popular in Japan, while were were still using monochrome phones in the West.
As a result, the Japanese internet came to be dominated by mobile phones rather than PC's, and so Japanese internet sites and services were more often designed around mobile phones rather than PC's. Much of Japan's internet history has been dominated by mobile phones, whereas much of our internet history has been dominated by PC's.
@magicalclick said:
The simple answer is, Japanese PC gamers only play PC98 games (aka dating games).
The PC98 has been dead for a long time now. And the PC98 wasn't just dating games, but it had a diverse library, including RPG's, visual novels, adventure games, shooters, action, puzzle, strategy, horror, etc. At its height in the 16-bit era, the PC98's popularity in Japan more or less rivalled the SNES. However, since the PC98 wasn't well known in the West, we never received most of the PC98's games, except for the ones ported to Japanese consoles or Western computer platforms. Japan also had other computer platforms, like the FM Towns and Sharp X68000, which were more powerful than Western computer platforms in their time.
The decline of Japanese computer gaming more or less coincided with the rise of Windows 95 and PlayStation, with most former Japanese computer game developers at the time choosing to migrate to Sony's PlayStation rather than Microsoft's Windows. In many ways, it's similar to the migration of many Western PC developers to consoles a decade later.
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