alt Hacker NewsI have never found Japan the home of gaming pc's anyway. It isn't quite like Seoul in that respect. I have shopped in Akibahara frequently in the last decade and noticed some PC gaming exclusive shops pop up and also go, including range of stock varying.
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crims0n • last Thursday at 5:16 PM
I am not sure what is driving it, but PC gaming has had some explosive growth in Japan recently. I think in 2024 they were up to 15% of marketshare.
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jama211 • last Thursday at 5:54 PM
In my experience akihabara was never great for PC hardware but other places are in Tokyo are. Also Osaka had some good spots for pc hardware even in the stereotypical spots like den den town.
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Akihabara was where runoffs and spillovers from cutting edge electronics accumulated until ~2010s. There used to be tons of failed experiments and EOL'd enterprise gears washing up. After that, supplies shifted to Taiwan and then to Shenzhen in China.
As far as gaming is concerned, the "gaming" parts of Akihabara mainly concerned locally produced pastel toned 2D slideshow pornographic games("visual novels"), the genre that lead to gacha games like FGO. Local populace is horrible at handling 3D first-person content in general and that never helped.
Non-console gaming in Japan is growing somewhat but a lot is also going into phones, namely Genshin. So where the trend is headed is still pastel toned soft-porn games without much PvP.