First part - that's not my logic. Even in the bit you clipped out of my post, that's not my logic.

1. My post is specifically about dedicated gaming consoles.
2. Smartphones aren't a dedicated gaming console. They're not even a platform. They're an entire product category of different products and platforms (or a sub-category of mobile devices).
3. If you want to call Smartphones the market leader based on what you've written, go for it - but it's not my logic you're using, it's your straw man.
4. The reason the PS5 isn't the market leader based on PS4's numbers is because the PS4 is a different platform - PS4 is Sony's last-generation platform, not their current one. It's really simple stuff.

Second Part - I'm trying to understand your point in the second part about Valve, and what it has to do with my point. My point was that the Steam Deck is a perfect illustration as to why we use unit sales rather than total revenue to determine a platform's place in the dedicated console space - if it's not obvious, only a small percentage of Valve's revenue was generated by the Steam Deck. So, for example, if Nintendo's revenue is 15 billion USD, we wouldn't say the Steam Deck has half of the market share in the dedicated gaming console space that the Switch has. It would be far lower than that.

It's not a straw man. There is no reason to just arbitrarily cut out the smartphone market because you set an unnecessary boundary that only includes "dedicated home consoles". That boundary didn't need to be there because smart phones is also a valid way to play games too. Also, by your own logic again, when Switch 2 launches the Switch will no longer be market leader because it will just become an irrelevant "legacy platform" according to your rules. We can't just ignore the contribution an older console is making to the business because we deem it's just a legacy platform.

Well you said that if you only go by revenue and not unit sales, than Steam deck is the most influential. Well, even if you go by revenue alone the steam deck and Valve is still fourth in the competitive list. So, still not the most influential. Steam deck is 4'th in unit sales and Valve is 4th in revenue. So, they match perfectly. 

In no way I implied Valve was the king of videogames because they sell units with SteamDeck, but because it's the major seller of games sales on PCs. The number of users and purchases in Steam is as big, if not bigger, as the Big 3 combined.

At greatly cost for the market, each one of the Big 3 could end tomorrow and we would still have a console market. If Valve closed Steam though, the PC market as we know would end

A bit curious, do you have a Switch?

I am sorry guys I helped derail the thread.  We are wading into semantics territory where we would need to define things to the Nth degree (forget about smart phones, you can play Doom on a McDonald's soft serve machine and nearly anything else with a display - so what is a game console?).  I should have just let the "Market Leader"  comment go. It will only be pointless arguing.  Again, my bad.

You know what? I know when to walk away. You win.

I apologize the other posters here who are likely just as confused as I am. Now, let me make this correction. Apparently, I was wrong about what my own argument was. When I was making an argument for why we measure dedicated video game platforms by hardware sales unit, I actually meant "dedicated video game platforms aren't a thing." Luckily, there was a very, very, very smart person called Hardtack-Platinum, who kindly explained my own argument to me.

So, VGChartz, you are wrong to split out legacy platforms and make a distinction between dedicated video game consoles and other types of devices that play games. Please adjust your data collations so they add up to the following:

Xbox: 31.21M - 0.12%

Nintendo Switch: 146.04M - 0.55%

Playstation 5: 67.70M + 117.19M = 184.89M - 0.70%

Smartphones: 26 Billion - 98.62%

Honestly, no I don't think so in the long run they would have sold more systems.

N64 would have sold north of 80-90 million systems if it retained the same 3rd party support the Super NES had (they compromised on the CD issue and kept Squaresoft happy). Mario 64 + Final Fantasy VII/VIII/IX + GoldenEye 007 + Zelda: OoT would've crushed the Playstation and Nintendo would've reaped the full benefit of a growing game industry (ie: people who were kids as NES and SNES owners moving on up in their teenage years to N64 as new kids were also coming in).

I'm honestly not sure how well the Playstation does, in Japan for example PS1 was not really doing huge numbers even by about 1996 it was getting outsold there by the Sega Saturn. In the US the sales were better sure, but not like amazing prior to about late 1996. The N64 sold way, way faster out of the gate than the PS1 did. It's likely too that companies making games like Tomb Raider 2, Metal Gear Solid, etc. would not agree to exclusives on Playstation and miss out on the larger N64 userbase if it had CD. 

From there, well GameCube or N64-2 likely just repeats a similar number or goes higher as Playstation never establishes itself as a market leader, who knows if there's even a PS2.

Game Boy Advance would sell over 100 million units.

Etc. etc. You can see where this goes. Even with the Wii and DS spikes, I think they would have sold more in the long run had they maintained their position as the defacto 3rd party platform as the NES and SNES were. Game Boy would've continued on and cleaned up because of Pokemon and IMO their console side business would've grown past 90-100 million per generation just with the natural growth of the industry. 

Yes, because the person who was talking about market leaders was the crazy one, not the OP who suggested Nintendo was right to not build a platform strong enough to run third party games. 

The N64, GCN, Wii, and Wii U sold about 168 million consoles combined

In a hypothetical "alternate timeline" where Nintendo maintains their status as the defacto 3rd party platform as the NES and SNES, I think their next 4 systems would have done considerably better than that. So they lost a lot of sales here, also software sales probably would've been much higher too with more games overall being released. 

Portables would be about the same, the seed for the Game Boy resurgence with Pokemon was already planted in 1996 so that would've just proceeded as it did, and they likely would've just held handheld dominance gen after gen too. Maybe they don't spike quite as high as 150 mill like the DS did, but I think they comfortably would've sold 100+ mill portables per gen.

Obviously not