I have never found Japan the home of gaming pc's anyway. It isn't quite like Seoul in that respect. I have shopped in Akibahara frequently in the last decade and noticed some PC gaming exclusive shops pop up and also go, including range of stock varying.
Akihabara was where runoffs and spillovers from cutting edge electronics accumulated until ~2010s. There used to be tons of failed experiments and EOL'd enterprise gears washing up. After that, supplies shifted to Taiwan and then to Shenzhen in China.
As far as gaming is concerned, the "gaming" parts of Akihabara mainly concerned locally produced pastel toned 2D slideshow pornographic games("visual novels"), the genre that lead to gacha games like FGO. Local populace is horrible at handling 3D first-person content in general and that never helped.
Non-console gaming in Japan is growing somewhat but a lot is also going into phones, namely Genshin. So where the trend is headed is still pastel toned soft-porn games without much PvP.
Phone games seem to have been popular for a good decade. I find the extravagant advertistments in stations like Shinjuku are always rather impressive but I never quite get into any of those games like Genshin and Honkai.
Those are social games. They don't make sense for someone not in a player community for a specific title on Twitter/Discord or in physical classrooms/breakrooms.
That is a good point. I guess they are WoW esque but don't have the in app chat in the same way, and I am not in that community. Most of my Japanese friends are arcade types and I would go and play driving games with them like Initial D.
In my experience akihabara was never great for PC hardware but other places are in Tokyo are. Also Osaka had some good spots for pc hardware even in the stereotypical spots like den den town.
Oh I always preferred den den on the few occasions I have visited Osaka. I find it better value and less glossy. Saying this I did used to love a used Thinkpad shop around the back of Sofmap in Akiba. Very good value. Captain PC or something if I remember rightly. It shut I think in 2021 which was sad.
