Third party sales are currently generally lower than they used to be, but once again, digital is higher than it used to be. It's not a 10% share anymore. 30%, sometimes 40% is not unusual and counting digital only games, most games are digital only, digital sales most likely make up over 50% of all sold software in Japan.
I remember last year there was a digital only party game (forgot it's name) where the publishers expected to sell like 20k copies and it overperformed to such a degree that they are making a sequel and reported it's sales, I think it reached 60k at one point. That's also how in the Media Create Sales threads people were able to determine that Bravely Default II sold at least 60k digitally because it had charted higher.
I just think that the doom and gloom here is a bit of an overreaction.
