The Tokyo Game Show is huge for the Asian market. This year’s TGS is expected to be the biggest in its 22 year history and there’s plenty for some gamers to get excited over, but does it really matter to gamers on this side of the world?

Of the big three, only Sony will have an official press conference at the event. Nintendo and Microsoft will be passing on this year’s event. That news shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. PlayStation has always outperformed Xbox in the Asian markets and Nintendo has been satisfied with doing things their own way lately. Plus, they’ve already had two Direct events this month and we can only see so many new trailers for Super Mario Odyssey.

Of course, there will still be plenty of big developers present at TGS 2017. Atlus, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Konami, Sega, Square Enix and more will all have booths at the event.

So if you’re a gamer with interest in PlayStation or any of the major developers at TGS, then it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on the event. Unfortunately, that still leaves a big segment of the gaming population with no apparent reason to be interested in the Tokyo Game Show.

To gamers outside of Asia, TGS often feels like a source of white noise. But even if you have no interest in the even or any of it’s games, there’s still one very good reason to pay attention. The Asian market is huge and growing even bigger. Publishers and developers are beginning to hone in on it now more than ever. And that means we could start seeing trends from that market bleed into other gaming markets around the world.

So much of gaming and gaming culture is already derived from Japan and other Asian countries. Plus, many of the world’s best gamers come from that part of the world already.

To those who don’t see the relevance of TGS, just think about all the great things we’ve gotten from Japan (both Nintendo and Sony come Japan and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). Japan is like the base of the gaming tree, with most all elements of gaming branching off from it in a million different ways and the Tokyo Game Show is the chauvinistic heart of one of that tree’s biggest branches.