PC enthusiasts can now rejoice, as this week's Tokyo Game Show 2017, which ran from Sept. 21 to 24, put the spotlight on PC gaming and brought much-needed attention to the gaming platform.
Due to the popularity of certain e-sports titles, as well as some competitive multiplayer games like "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG)," the PC gaming scene got a main-stage tournament feature at Tokyo Game Show 2017 in the past days. The combination of esports, "PUBG," and more compact graphics chips for laptops are the main reasons why PC gaming is growing in popularity in Japan, as confirmed by Bloomberg.
Japan's gaming scene is predominantly console-focused, mostly due to Sony releasing exclusive Japanese titles, as well as exclusive and highly-rated PlayStation 4 games. That said, it has been projected that PC sales are to rise by about three to four percent over the coming years; consoles, on the other hand, have been seeing little to no development in sales.
This was quite a twist in the gaming community. As quoted by Bloomberg, Japan's gaming executive at Nvidia Corp., Kazunori Takahashi, said that gaming PCs previously considered as expensive and bulky are now seeing a comeback and threatening the console market share.
Console makers, however, are not ignoring this trend. In the last year, users saw Microsoft and Sony upgrading their consoles to prevent their player base from migrating to PC.
Nevertheless, despite efforts by the Tokyo Game Show 2017 to bring PC gaming into the light, the event was still heavily dominated by mobile games. Even consoles apparently could not keep up with the platform, since most of the games they featured at the Game Show were PlayStation 2 high-definition remakes.
While the spotlight on PC gaming may be due to esports and "PUBG's" popularity, it could be short-lived. Last June, developers of "PUBG" inked a deal with Microsoft to release the game on Xbox by the end of the year. This may also increase the sales of Xbox One since the console is still considerably more affordable than a high-end gaming PC; the same thing can be said for the PlayStation.
Still, PC gaming may have an answer for that. Gaming laptop builder Micro-Star International Co. has announced their revenue increase from sales of gaming laptops, which has more than doubled since 2013.
