2017 is a huge year for the casino industry in Asia, since Japan – one of the most conservative countries in the East when it comes to betting money on games – has just passed a ground-breaking law which removed the ban on casinos on their soil. Now, if you’re not super-familiar with Japan and its casino environment, as well as that of its neighboring countries, you might be wondering why this is a big deal at all. “More and more casinos are legalizing gambling every day, what makes Japan so different”, you might be asking. Well, if that’s the case, allow me to explain.
The thing is, while the Japanese government despises gambling almost as much as it hates uncensored pornography, the Japanese absolutely adore it. In the West, the culture of spending money on games has shifted dramatically from what it once was, and now gamers can be neatly categorized in three different categories – people who pay for games outright (on platforms like PC and PS4) and then like to enjoy a finished product, people who pay little by little on mobile games and people who play casino games. And there’s very little overlap between these three groups, and basically no overlap between them and the people who don’t play games at all. In Japan, however, gamers are gamers. Sure, you’ve got people who love to hang out at the pachinko parlor all day, but generally speaking the mindset is that a game is a game regardless of the platform it’s on. Handheld and mobile games are really popular in Japan, and it’s basically the only place in the world where arcades are thriving. If you’ve got one million gamers in the West, you could probably count on a very small number of them to visit a casino, and only with the right incentive, like skill-based slots. If you’ve got one million gamers in Japan, though, you can, in theory, make every last one of them place a bet once you open a casino.
Don’t believe me? Well, the overlap between these cultures goes so deep that some types of games that have existed for years in Japan are basically gambling under a different name! One example of this is gacha games, which are mobile titles with a very high amount of random number generator. In a Western mobile game, you might be paying for extra lives or specific characters, but in a Japanese gacha game you often have no choice in the matter and need to spend money to buy packs of random characters – you might get a couple of really good ones, or they might all be useless. Even more blatant is the pachinko scheme that many places in Japan are running. I’ve covered pachinko in the past, but I never spoke about the fascinating way people use it to gamble by winning prizes from their machines and then exchanging them for cash. It’s a story in and of itself, which I may cover in more detail next time.
So, in conclusion, by opening just a couple of casinos and enticing gamers and Pachinko gamblers to try them out, Japan is looking at a GIGANTIC profit margin – some sources speculate a $10 billion annual profit from just three operating casinos. And while we’ll need to wait for another 5-6 years before we know whether or not reality will meet expectations, I’m personally very optimistic.
