Hmm, interesting question. So, I looked at VGC data for european sales:

This includes handhelds. As you can see the DS was massive in europe, and nothing replaced it really, so europe looks weaker in that regard.

If you exclude handhelds:

This is not that clear-cut anymore. As PS4 was accompinied by relatively weak consoles the last years look weaker than the Wii+PS3+X360 years. Still, not a massive decline, but a moderately weaker time.

That doesnt help without also seeing the trends of US or Japan because hes asking about Europes performance in relation to the other regions.

You can see that PC gaming is huge globally. In the Asian market it completely dominates the console market. PC gaming gets bigger every year.

Now for the spending it's not an accurate representation since a lot of people just play free to play games without spending money, such as League of Legends and Dota 2. Also the PC offers cheaper games, so most PC gamers just wait for sales or find a game for a cheaper price on another storefront/distribution site. Example is DOOM 2016 on launch day was $30 on G2A. It was a Steam code.

Fair enough. Here a regional breakdown of the sales, first overall and then separated for home console and handheld:

I counted Switch both toward home console and handheld, so the recent upswing in handhelds is all Switch.

Thank you! Very informative and shows every region has pretty much the same sales trends.

People need to realize that the PS4 is still $300, after nearly 6 years on the market and games like Kingdom Hearts 3/Resident Evil 2 Remake can only do so much to drive an old platform that is priced so high.

Price cuts need to happen to drive new sales, but Sony is still selling really well anyways. This is just Switch's time to shine.

5 years and 2 months isnt nearly 6 years....but your point still stands, PS4 sales are very impressive.

Europe is more PC centric, but that depends on the country. For example, average Brit is not that different than average American (in terms of hardware purchases). 

I agree.  However it also shows how strong they are in Japan.  In Europe the Switch is currently viewed as an "average" console.  It's not a flop, but it's nothing special either.  In Japan it is selling like crazy in spite of its $300 price tag.  That shows just how much Japan really loves the Switch.

And both territories are extremely important.  Obviously there is a lot more profit potential in Europe.  However Japan has a lot of significance strategically.  Nintendo has put a lot of effort into shutting Sony out of Japan.  The advantage here is that Japan has a disproportionately high amount of development studios.  If you exclude indies, then almost half of the remaining games come from Japan.  Since Nintendo is dominating the Japanese market it also means that most Japanese developers will focus on making games for the Switch.  (The exceptions being really big developers like Capcom and Square-Enix.)  

The Switch is going to get a lot of third party exclusive content.  Sure most of it will be Japanese games that are small-medium in budget, but that is still a lot of exclusive content.  Every system needs its share of big games, but Nintendo is capable of making the big games on its own.  Over the next couple of years Switch is going to get more and more exclusives that are small-medium Japanese games that will fill in the gaps that Nintendo can't fill on their own.  I know when that happens, North America is going to swing very hard towards the Switch, even more than they are doing now.  I believe that Europe will too, but it might take them a bit longer to come around.  The console with the best game library is always the winner each generation.  Switch will have the best game library for generation 9.