Japan’s market for mobile content worth $8.8 billion in 2012, games bring in $5.1 billion

Dr. Serkan Toto is a gaming expert and independent consultant based in Tokyo. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog. This article is republished with his permission.

Japan’s Mobile Content Forum (MCF) has issued a new report (PDF link) that includes a number of interesting statistics on this country’s mobile industry. The entire mobile content business was worth $8.8 billion in Japan last year.

According to the MCF, Japan’s market for mobile gaming reached roughly $5.1 billion in 2012 – $2.4 billion on feature phones, and $2.7 billion on smartphones.

According to the MCF, the market for mobile commerce and content combined in Japan was sized at JPY 2.3507 trillion in 2012 ($24.4 billion), up a very handsome 23 percent from 2011.

I’ve translated the key graphs into English (below). Within that $24.4 billion market, mobile content accounted for $8.8 billion:

The market just for mobile content in Japan in 2012 was still bigger on feature phones, but it contracted by 27 percent compared to a year before.

That difference was overcompensated by the respective market on smartphones, which grew 4.6-fold year-on-year to reach $3.8 billion:

What about games inside this mobile content market?

The size of the market for gaming on feature phones in Japan in 2012 reached around $2.4 billion – roughly $2 billion for social games, and another $410 million for mobile games (titles that are not distributed through social gaming networks like GREE or Mobage).