Japanese Game Company Strategies for Entering China: Comparative Case Studies from 1989 to 2019

Since the end of the 1980s, numerous Japanese game companies have attempted to enter the Chinese market, now the world’s largest for online and smartphone games. While these companies had successfully outsourced production to China early on, entering China’s consumer sector has proven more difficult. Based on semi-structured interviews with managers at Japanese companies that have consumer divisions in China, this chapter describes their struggles entering the Chinese market. Particular attention is paid to three general phases of how Japanese companies considered China as an opportunity target—China as a site for outsourcing, China as an emerging market, and China as a mature market—and these phases are explored through representative case studies, namely Sony Interactive Entertainment, Koei Tecmo, and Square Enix.