A new console generation is a total refresh. We've seen it swing back and forth pretty hard many times in the past. It's naive to assume next gen will turn out exactly the same as this one.

Except in Japan. No way Xbox does anything there.

It's not shrinking at least not yet.  Some of it is that Xbox is a failed competitor and Nintendo has had a great increase in console sales to core gamers.

Correct and Correct.  However, console sales could start to decline in the future.

Well first, every single person that purchases a console is not a hard-core gamer. A lot of people, arguably the majority of gamers are casuals in this day and age, regardless of the system they play on. Of all the people I know and with all the PC's and consoles they have put together, easily 80% of their hardware is used for Candy Crush, the Sims and other such casual software.

Hard-core gamers used to be the majority, long long ago back when video gaming was a thing for nerds. Which means they were the majority of a niche hobby. The real growth in video games consumption roughly since the mid 1990's is mostly of casuals. And today we are drowning in a sea of casuals. The mobile market is absolutely huge, close to a couple billion people playing casually.

If anything I'd say we hard-core gamers are growing but at a much slower pace than the casuals so proportionally we are shrinking and becoming irrelevant. I can only hope that there will be enough of us to sustain and make the creation of good hard-core games a profitable market for video games publishers for many years to come but with the seemingly endless growth of casuals that don't care about quality, intrusive loot-boxes, pay-to-win mechanics etc, I am not sure how we (hard-core gamers) even have a future. Time will tell.

I don't think what you're considering is the casual gamer may be moving away from hardware that's focused on core gaming.

The 6th and 7th gen consoles had a ton of software that people considered casual or shovelware. I feel much of that type of software moved to mobile devices, became free downloads and that's where much of the casual audience is now.

Also, its worth considering Nintendo platforms after Wii lost much of the casual audience Nintendo had. The 3DS for example sold much less than DS because casual gamers began playing games on portable smart devices.

Nintendo fans seem to be annoyed you've dismissed the Switch as a core platform and I can see their point. It's evident the Switch audience is not the exact same as PS4 and X1 users, they don't buy 3rd party core games in the same numbers. However, the Switch library and software sales do show it has a core following.

I believe the core gaming market is going strong, but casuals aren't doing much gaming on consoles. Much of kid and family friendly stuff is being played on smart devices. That started in the 7th gen.

Consoles just lost casual gamers. At least so far. People tend to forget Eyetoy, Singstar and Kinect for example. Attach rate has grown over the generations as well, AFAIK.

People don't need handhelds or consoles for casual gaming anymore, though there still are casual gamers on consoles, but way less than there where in the good old days.

And yes, Switch has a lot of core and hardcore gamers as well.

I can't consider who buy less than 2 games a year (all platforms considered) to be hardcore. And that is more than what the average on the system (5 years and ratio is about 10 SW per HW).

Most of us in VGC (even if needing to wait for severe deals and the like) probably buy over one game per month.

No dont think so especially because Nintendo also got a bit more hardcore since 3 generations.