This is a neat look into a pretty widely forgotten tangent of Valve history: Japanese arcade games. A lot of western viewers might be confused as to why Namco and Taito even bothered with such efforts, so let's do a quick dive into the historical circumstances of these games. https://twitter.com/stopskeletons/status/1311386730474483712

The biggest thing that probably made these modified ports possible is the fact that in the 2000s, Japanese arcades were slowly shifting away from proprietary or console-derived hardware in favor of PC-based systems, albeit with added protections to ward off piracy.

These Valve ports were housed in some of the earlier arcade systems to make the shift to PC architectures and nowadays, it's basically par for the course for Japanese arcade games to literally just house PC parts. It's what makes it possible to play dumps of them on ordinary PCs.

Why bring Valve shooters to arcades, though? Japanese market dynamics. PC literacy and the presence of outright PCs in Japanese homes has historically been (and remains) comparatively low. There's always been a niche market of Japanese PC gamers who buy/play western stuff, but...

The barrier to entry for bringing those games into Japanese homes is therefore big, partly in a quite literal sense considering how much space is a premium in many Japanese homes. Put simply, while Valve's games are loc'd in Japanese, their market has a circumstantial upper limit

Compare that, then, to arcades, which are plentiful in urban centers, require no setup on the consumer end, and are pick up and play for 100 yen a pop. Even if it's not an audience that overlaps with the PC crowd 1:1, arcades have an inherent accessibility that's hard to beat.

So, when you combine that, the relative cheapness in securing PC parts compared to proprietary hardware, and the enduring appeal of shooting galleries as a genre, eventually, the numbers add up in a way that's relatively unique to the Japanese market, even now.

What you get in the end are games that might not offer a pristine replica of what PC players got in other countries, but are still versions of those core ideas that are much more accessible to your average Japanese arcade goer, be they casual or hardcore types just without a PC.

Did they light Japanese arcade sales charts on fire at the time? I doubt it. But in the mid-2000s especially, it was probably the easiest way for savvy players who only knew about Valve's stuff in passing to get at least a taste of what their games offer on a mechanical level.

I'm not aware of arcade ports of other western shooters post-L4D2, but you will sometimes still see cabinets that offer some semblance of PC-ish experiences, whether it's in gameplay or the interface outright, which is telling of how little the needle has moved with PCs.