CyberZ, a subsidiary of Toky0-based Internet conglomerate CyberAgent (4751), released a report on the size of the Japanese market for smartphone games today.

According to the report, the domestic market was worth 546.8 billion yen (US$5.4 billion) in 2013, up a staggering 178% from 2012.

What’s interesting is that this industry now reached roughly 50% of the Japanese gaming industry overall, which is sized at 1103.6 billion yen (US$10.8 billion) in 2013.

The reason why CyberZ focuses on smartphones in particular is that Japan is the only country in the world that still has a big feature phone game industry: Japan’s Mobile Content Forum (MCF) last year said that industry by itself was still worth US$2.4 billion in 2012  (see here for details).

By way of comparison: MCF estimated a size of US$2.7 billion for Japan’s smartphone game market in 2012, while the chart above, at roughly US$3 billion, lands in the same ballpark for that year.

http://www.serkantoto.com/2014/03/25/japan-smartphone-mobile-game-market/

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So if you read to right it means that Mobile (Smartphone + feature phones) >>>> dedicated gaming

when the 3ds dies it will be like 90% of the market

After seeing that I'm surprised square enix aren't making FF XV and KH 3 for smartphones.

the future is pretty clear:

There goes any hopes of the larger publishers making many more handheld games.

While we know the handheld market has gone through quite the shrink, a lot of that statistic can be credited to phones simply being a necessity. If you were to compare the total smart phone install base to the dedicated handheld market, it would seem somewhat less impressive.

wow they have low standards.

Why does the Android wear the crown? In Japan iOS is still the king: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile+tablet-os-JP-weekly-201233-201405

or some really awesome smart phone games =P

Isn't that the case pretty much everywhere?