Japan is one of the world’s central hubs for game publishing. As the base for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Konami, Bandai Namco, and many others, the Japanese public are conditioned to high quality games from a variety of genres. This love for video games translates to online viewership: 31% of all gamers in Japan watch live streaming, from a combination of RPGs to esports to casual titles. As such an influential market for live-streaming with very different tastes to many Western markets, it’s worth looking into the Japanese live-streaming landscape more closely.
In this article, we’re looking at the performance of live-streaming platforms in Japan, the top creators in the region, and which Japanese brands are getting attention online.
YouTube Takes the Lead from Twitch in Japan Live Streaming Viewership
Looking first at overall viewership, Japanese interest in live streaming is booming. Over the past three years, live streaming viewership has increased in almost every single quarter among Japanese-speaking audiences up to 668M hours watched. That’s almost double Q1 2021 levels at just 349M hours watched. Twitch has been the big winner over these past three years, growing by 222M hours watched compared to YouTube’s (still very impressive) growth of 136M.
Meanwhile, however, the popularity of homegrown platforms has been petering off. Both OPENREC and Mildom have lost viewership over the past three years, down to just several million each in Q2 2024. Mildom’s decline was precipitated by a sudden exodus of many of the platform’s most popular content creators in 2022, including Aki-Games and minoru4160. OPENREC, however, has been more stable overall, generally floating around 10M hours watched per quarter over the past three years.
The reason for OPENREC’s relative stability could be attributed to its ability to reward the loyalty of its best content creators. Conducting an analysis of the ratio between viewership for each platform in Q2 2024 vs. the number of unique Japanese-speaking channels on said platform reveals some interesting insights. Although Twitch has far more hours watched than OPENREC, it relies upon 184K channels to generate this viewership compared to just 1.9K for OPENREC. In other words, the viewership:unique channels ratio for Twitch is less than half that of OPENREC (with YouTube being way out in front at almost double OPENREC’s ratio).
So why are so few channels able to generate a proportionally higher amount of viewership than Twitch? As a homegrown platform, OPENREC invests far more heavily in Japanese streaming culture. Just this year, OPENREC sponsored Junichi Kato’s Hyper Game Tournament, an extravaganza of some of the most famous Japanese streaming personalities. For viewers embedded in the cultural milieu of Japanese streaming, OPENREC is the go-to platform.
The Top Japanese Live Streamers Feature VTubers and Fighting Game Pros
With creators so important to a platform’s success, it’s crucial to understand who the top Japanese-speaking creators are. A quick glance reveals that 7 of the top 10 Japanese-speaking streamers are VTubers, with all but one of them streaming on YouTube. This explains YouTube’s dominance in Japanese live-streaming, providing the best home for VTubers with its mixed capability of live-streaming and shorter videos for concerts and other variety content. Usada Pekora is a shining example of VTuber qualities, leading Q2 2024 with an average minute viewership (AMA) of 33K.
However, esports is also important to Japanese-speaking streamers. Many of the top male Japanese-speaking streamers such as Kuzuha, Junichi Kato, and fps_shaka play competitive games to mass appeal. This makes sense given the growing demand for esports in Japan. Fighting games are particularly important to the Japanese community, with Street Fighter 6 being the top game for a couple of these streamers in Q2 2024. This emphasis on fighting games may just be a Q2 trend however, thanks to the popularity of fighting games at EVO Japan back in April.
Japanese Car and Tech Brands Get the Most Exposure on Twitch
Japan’s influence on live streaming doesn’t only come through its creators and users, however. The prevalence of certain Japanese brands on live streaming represents the popularity of Japanese technology amongst gamers.
For the focal point of this analysis, we’ve excluded Japanese brands relating to gaming such as publishers and game titles. Car brands receive by far the most chat mentions on Twitch, with Toyota and Nissan receiving 126K and 82K chat mentions during Q2 2024, respectively. Optical technology brand Olympus is a rare exception to this trend, garnering 118K chat mentions on Twitch – but this may be due to other uses of the term “Olympus” such as the esports team of the same name
Among gaming-related brands, Nintendo and PlayStation are overwhelmingly favored at 1M and 982K chat mentions each. According to Famitsu, Nintendo has a stranglehold on the Japanese physical games market with 77.4% of all sales and 869K copies sold in the first half of 2024. One surprising standout among these gaming brands, however, is Yu-Gi-Oh! which had an incredible 367K chat mentions on Twitch in Q2 2024. Konami, as publisher of games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, is also seeing recognition on live-streaming with 126K chat mentions.
The gaming and live-streaming markets in Japan are strong. But the trend towards Western platforms (Twitch and Google) reflects a desire for more Western content amongst the younger generation. In fact, Steam has seen over 150% growth among Japanese users in the past 5 years. Stream Hatchet will watch as the combination of Western platforms and Japanese culture continue to inspire new collaborations on live streaming.
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