But we do know its evidently false from a lot of figures. You can't sell more hardware in a declining market for one. When it comes to software, Nintendo first party games have sold more in Japan during the Switch era. What is true is that many third party games are selling less in Japan, from smaller Nihon Falcom games to bigger Square Enix games. But for Nintendo itself, Japan has not been a declining market at all. But for Japanese third parties and Sony, they are selling less in Japan than ever before, but Nintendo games has bucked that trend totally, and saw record breaking sales for pretty much all their major franchises in the Japanese market.

Japan buys more gaming consoles than any other country besides the US. Switch also sold more in Japan than PS4 did in the US. That doesn't sound like a declining market, just a dying PS market which brings down the 3rd parties that support it. Hence why we see some of them pivoting.

Yes, when it comes to the console market, its hard to find any market that buy as many consoles as the Japanese market does on a per capita basis. Meaning if console gaming is dead in Japan, its dead all over the world, just from that fact alone.

Read what I wrote in the post before. A single company cannot be an indicator for an entire market.  It is entirely possible for Nintendo to sell more hardware in a declining market, if 9/10 car manufacturers are in steep decline you can't say the market is growing just because 1/10 is having a personal peak. This is why I ask what is the data for the market as a whole, not just Nintendo. 

What is evident from figures is the hardware market has declined but that is the evolution I talk about. Handheld and console market have been consolidated, financially that is less $ income/ units sold, but it doesn't reflect less interest. Software however can be a better indicator of overall interest

But if Nintendo has managed to buck the trend in that specific market, and getting a bigger slice of the pie, that just means that third parties and Sony are doing something wrong, and Nintendo is doing some things right. After all, while Final Fantasy has declined massively over the years in Japan, Pokemon or even Pikmin has grown. There was nothing preventing third parties from not suffering a massive decline in Japan. What happened was that Japanese third parties placed all their bets on Sony and Playstation, so when Playstation declined in Japan, they all declined together with Playstation in the Japanese market.

I want to regurgitate the fact that its almost impossible to find any market that buys as much console hardware as the Japanese market, on a per capita basis. That means if one states that Japan is a declining market for consoles, then we don't really have any good market for consoles left in the world.

Decline is relative to where it was, not to other nations. So if in 2013 you had Japanese market encapsulate 

DS: 32m
Wii:12m
PS3:9m
PSP:11m
360:1m

Does the current market match up? Of course it doesn't but as mentioned I think software sales is more interesting because its clear hardware has been consolidated and that doesn't necessarily mean loss of interest. Hardware won't take into account PC either which is adjacent to the console market. So again it's a genuine question to look at the overall state of the japanese market and not just Nintendo peaking

PS is priced 75K yen in Japan, it would be pretty much impossible for the PS to not be dying in Japan at that price level. Economics have consequences.

And that can still equate to a market decline. Market declines often have reasons, they're not anomalies without explanation. As far as explanations go, that is also why I wrote

"Was it just that not enough developers were making titles for Japans preferred platform or has tastes shifted in such a way where the market is in dominated by only select few titles etc."

The qualitative analysis is honestly a lot to to get into but ultimately a discussion in itself. If Japanese taste has skewed in a way where they are loosing interesting in most gaming outside of Nintendo, or developers have skewed their games in a way where they are loosing japanese gamers, that is still a decline in interest. If only a select few third parties can break 1m, that reflects a decline from where we were. How easily that can be reversed (if it needs reversing), is an interesting question.

The PS hardware situation is less telling than the software one.

Does anyone have a clue as to when we'll get the latest numbers?