Not wrong and as a result, what already was a solid support from their companies to the platform, grew in numbers making it the platform to go for when it comes to Japanese titles alongside Switch. I would also argue that handheld PC's helped a bit there.
Playism is a big supporter of Steam. I can't remember how long ago they made the jump through. Previously they had their own store that they were selling games on, but that has since long closed down. They are a big supporter of indie games in Japan. WSS I view as a "newer" version of Playism and they publish/work on a lot of cool games. I can't recall their connection though. I think WSS had a game or two published by Playism and then WSS started to publish their own stuff and the stuff of others.
Was it in 2015 when Steam added the yen, and the in 2017 you had PUBG that became popular in Japan. Vtuber came a few years later and then Covid happened.
On a somehow related not. I saw something about how years ago people said "oh the Steam Deck is the Switch killer" but in reality the Steam Deck (and I guess Steam as well) is the PS5 killer. In places like Japan the Steam Deck cost more than a PS5, but now the PS5 is more expensive than the Steam Deck. So not sure what the future holds for it, since the economy in Japan isn't doing good and that's why they had to raise the price of the PS5. People income isn't really increasing is it?
I think it was the president of WSS that says he was profiting off Japan not doing so well. Steam pays in USD and not in yen. Or something like that and there for when he converts it back to yen he gets a lot more money or something like that.
The worst part is that its not even lazyness, the variant system plays into a weird fucking deck building system they have for heroes. You can't just pick a character and a loadout, you have to assemble a deck of characters with a lot of weird limitations that plays into the unique mode the game has and forces you to pick different characters and limits what you can pick (for example, the game had 16 playable characters but you could only have a maximum of 12 at your disposal at any given time due to the deck shit).
They made a point to make some aggressively convoluted shit that actively plays against stuff that people who play these sort of games enjoy - like being able to one trick a character. It is mind boggingly stupid.
That's even worse, I heard about the character limitation but didn't know about a Deck building element. I hope that at some point some one from their dev team is able to discuss the design philosophy behind all of that.
