Soundwave said:
I read the OP, aging population doesn't explain everything, Japan had an aging population 8-9 years ago too. Also I've been to Japan and spent several weeks there. The market is having demographic issues sure, but it's also seeing a massive migration over to mobile smartphone gaming. There is no doubt about it, Japan is the biggest app market for games in the world, bigger than the US, even though it has like 1/3 the population. And people here play on their mobiles a lot, so that tells you how crazy Japan is for smartphone games. |
I'm not sure exactly what is the demographic of mobile player on average in Japan, but I can say for sure that in my previous company we were making a few hundred million dollars a year from highly paying users (hundreds or even thousand dollar a month per user, I've seen a guy spending 4000$ one month). I tend to believe that the market "migration" is not as much a migration than a very high monetization rate from a much more small, older, single people crowd (highly paid or leaving at their parent's home).
