After a weekend marked by tariff disputes, Japan’s video game sector experiences a sharp decline in stock prices – Sony, Nintendo, Capcom, and others affected

As Monday morning begun in Japan hours ago, stock markets took a significant hit as a result of global financial uncertainty and the implementation of US president Donald Trump’s global tariffs on Saturday. The result has hit the entirety of the Japanese stock market hard, including the video game sector. Companies like Capcom, Nintendo, Sony, Bandai Namco and more have all seen sharp declines in stock value.

As of writing, the Japanese stock market has just stopped at 3:30PM, which means the current drops should be where things will settle for now.

Japanese games industry consultant Dr. Serkan Toto highlighted a few companies and how sharply stocks in them have fallen within a single day of trading, so we’ve been in and checked the final figures for the day, and outlined them below:

• Nintendo | – 7.85%
• Sony | – 10.4%
• Capcom | – 6.61%
• Bandai Namco | – 7.37%
• Square Enix | – 5.62%
• Sega | – 7.29%
• Koei Tecmo | – 5.41%

With the US enforcing its imposed tariffs on countries worldwide on Saturday, these sharp drops are a response to the financial turbulence that has come as a result. The US implemented a 24% tariff on all goods aside from auto imports (which didn’t get off easy, hit with a 25% levy). Most stocks in Japan took serious damage today as a result with the Nikkei 225 – Japan’s stock market index, kind of like the USA’s S&P 500 – falling 7.83%.

So why has the Japanese video game industry been hit so hard? Well, while your initial thoughts may go to places like GameStop and physical boxed copies of games being the culprit, it’s only one part of the problem. Yes, it will be more expensive for people in America to buy a copy of an upcoming release like Mario Kart World at their local store, which in turn will likely result in less people buying it and therefore less income. But, this would be somewhat cushioned by the growing majority of players who buy games digitally.

However, these tariffs also impact the hardware these games are played on. Nintendo announced a delay for US pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch 2 as US imports of the console will be hit with tariffs. Quite hard in fact, as Nintendo split its manufacturing to China and Vietnam, both countries currently suffering from larger US tariffs than even Japan. But the same is true for PS5s, Xbox Series X|Ss, mobile phones, PCs…everything!

Anything you could play a video game on will be made signficantly more expensive for the US consumer from last Saturday onwards. The tragedy is, even if the Japanese government were to make a deal with the US to remove these tariffs, companies like Nintendo and Capcom would still be hit hard unless tariffs are removed from other countries where gaming hardware and its components are manufactured.

The USA who remains one of the most powerful consumer bases in the world for the video game market. The American consumer spent $46.1 billion on video games last year, losing only to China in terms of money spent on gaming. Now, that’s in total revenue and not strictly revenue from game sales, so microtransactions are included in that figure. Nontheless it’s a figure that itself is likely to see a large decline this year. Especially if a recession does hit the USA, something that is looking more and more likely by the day.

It’s a dark omen for the health of the video game industry at large. Whether these stocks will recover in good time remains to be seen, but as long as these widespread tariffs persist, it’s hard to feel overly optimistic.