Yeah I know mobile is by far the largest, yet Switch is still considered a dedicated handheld and Steamdeck kinda qualifies there as well. Mobile to Switch is like PC to consoles.

My question is, is the market that buys dedicated hardware to play games growing or shrinking. And is the money spent per person still actually increasing? I know I'm spending less nowadays. My peak spending on games was in the PS3/360 days and started to slow down with PS4. Longer games, less time.

Two of Nintendo strongest fandoms were on handheld lines (Pokemon, Animal Crossing). Not like they don't have a big fandom on console line, but 3D Zelda and 3D Mario are notably their only big IPs absent from handhelds. Handhelds are overall more representative of Nintendo fandom than home consoles

By extension, Switch is also a better representation of combined Nintendo fandom.  As long as they keep releasing hybrids and don't price it too high (600 USD or more) we will likely never see a Nintendo console shipping less than 10 million copies in first year again. 

The market is growing, albeit not by much. Last generation the 3DS, Vita, Wii U, PS4 and Xbox One combined for ~280 million units, this generation Switch, PS5 and XSX|S combined will get above 300 million units for sure.

Money spent per person is increasing. Nowadays there are more subscription fees, DLCs, microtransactions and also higher game and console prices. Older gamers like yourself seeing their own spending decreasing compared to their own peak values are offset by the many younger gamers who have more time to play games than you.

You were the one suggesting that Xbox first party was doing more heavy lifting than Sony. The sales follow the games not the price or graphical power.

Either way the XB1 was cheaper than the PS4 for most of its life.

The XB1X was also the most powerful console of that generation.

3rd party support was strong outside of Japan. Japan was handily given to Nintendo and Sony without a fight from MS.

Much stronger Xbox One sales than I originally expected. I didn't expect more than 55M+ lifetime.

Xbox One sales are impressive considering all the mistakes Microsoft made with it. It was under tracked by about 7 million units it appears.
That puts Xbox One only about 4 million below NES.
Xbox Series X/S should dethrone OG Xbox later this year.

Yeah we had it undertracked by a decent amount, but also most estimates from other places had it in the low 50M range, while I remember seeing one at 55M. I was surprised to see it around 58M. 

when you have official numbers from before 58M only the 10M it is quite natural to be off, 10-15% is high but comprehensible.

Thanks. I'm still disappointed we had it that much undertracked. Sony and Nintendo are far easier as we get quarterly shipment totals. And Sony also released sell-through numbers recently for each quarter. At the end of March the ship sell-through gap for PS5 was about 2.4M. I was happy to see I had PS5 overtracked by about 100K at the end of March. Though I had to move some sales around a bit to match the quarterly sell-through.

And to make things harder on the historically good markets of Xbox you crosschecked with eventual leaking and info so it was very near for the whole time, so it is quite hard to guess where the 7M went.