Valve has released the June 2023 edition of its monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey. Among them, Japanese is ranked 6th next to Brazilian Portuguese,Redditetc. is attracting attention.
「Steam Hardware & Software Surveyis a monthly survey published by Valve. Data is collected from users who use the Steam client and who have consented to the survey. Various environmental information such as the OS version and the graphic board used are investigated, and the statistics are released every month.
Diverse data is also disclosed in the data for June 2023. Looking at the language information among them, it can be seen that the usage rate of Japanese has increased significantly to 2.82%. This is an increase of 0.71% from the previous month, surpassing German and French as the language usage rate.
The percentage of Japanese users has been on the rise in recent years. For example, our magazine reported that the number of Japanese users in March 2022 was 2.34%, the highest ever (related article). After that, it fluctuated around 2%. In particular, German and French were two major languages that Japanese seemed to surpass.These transitionsWayback MachineYou can check it by looking at the log. Under such circumstances, the number of users using Japanese has increased significantly since June.
It is unknown why the number increased rapidly in June. In the first place, the data of the “Steam Hardware & Software Survey” is greatly influenced by the trends of not only Japanese users but also users of other languages.For example, in March 2023data. Simplified Chinese users increased by 25% this month, while Japanese users decreased to 1.13%. The number of users of other languages also dropped, and this is an example of how the movement of simplified Chinese has had a major impact on how numbers look.
Data for March 2023
Nonetheless, there was little movement in other languages in June. Mr. Hiroshi Matsuyama of CyberConnect2 recently reported that the usage rate of Steam among students is high. The rise of PC games is also seen in Japan, and it may be thought that the number of Japanese-language users is steadily increasing.
When I took the questionnaire, the current status of the students playing Steam was as follows.
Steam=80%
Even if you don’t bother to buy a dedicated game machine, this is enough! It may be thought.
Then when will you play FF16?
After the Steam version is released, play slowly?
Hmm, I see.
— Hiroshi Matsuyama @ CyberConnect2 (@PIROSHI_CC2) June 27, 2023
As the number of Japanese-language users increases, the priority of Japanese-language support for games also rises. As a PC gamer, I would like to hope that the number of Japanese users will continue to increase. Another approach is for developers to decide which languages to support by looking at the “language usage rate of users on their wishlists.” If you want the game you are interested in to have Japanese support, don’t forget to add it to your wishlist.
