I was in fact talking about their home consoles which is the context of the conversation, this stemmed from comments about the PS5 poor sales. The benchmark has never been matching PSP+PS3 or PS4+PS Vita, just as the Switch hasn't been benhmarked against Wii + DS lol

They're not going back to 15m, that's not even a "hope"...

Internally they're not gonna have these arbitrary hardware goals in mind anyway. They've all focused on broader revenue & ecosystem goals which is why we didn't see much end of life deals or pushes for the PS4/Switch to hit X amount of million sold.

With the Switch shattering Wii+3DS combined sales, there's actually not much else Switch can be benchmarked against now, though...

And yet the point remains. Do we depict the Switch as a decline because its hardware sales is quite a way below the 45m of the Wii + DS? I just don't find that to be a genuine or constructive angle. The PS5 has outsold the Vita and will fall just a bit short of the PS4. 

Problem is under the point being argued Wii + DS aren't the Switch's predecessors, WiiU and 3DS are with 29m which means a 7m increase while the Wii + DS decrease would be attributed to WiiU and 3DS which the Switch as a single platform has done a big job in repairing.

It doesn't need to be the direct successor to the DS+Wii for it to be a comparative decline but its an obviously nonsense comparison. The whole point is no one would take the angle of lamenting Nintendo's loss in units compared to when they had 2 successful and highly differentiated devices selling alongside each other, versus now when they just have one. Again this conversation is obviously disingenuous and not constructive. I'll leave it there 

Actually it does because the context of the point they made was a continual decline so if Switch followed DS/Wii then yeah but it didn't the was a whole generation in between the two comparisons which changes the context of the numbers as Switch is an increase indicating a successful solution was executed to halt the decline and reverse it which is in stark contrast to the PS platforms which are selling less than the prior gen before them. They didn't compare one particular gen to another in their point about the PS decline they compared the trend from going from one gen to the next.

I don't know about "us" but I certainly do. Of course Nintendo saw a decline from the Wii / DS generation. There's absolutely no logical reason to simply ignore the handheld side of things. Do we measure success in the PC industry only by home computers and ignore laptops?  

Nintendo's sales declined sharply from 7th gen (Wii + DS) to 8th gen (Wii U + 3DS) and then increased again with the Switch. Handheld sales count. We can't just always ignore what's inconvenient to us, no matter if that makes "our" company more or less successful. 

So you are saying the NS1 is Gen 9, that means NS2 is Gen 10. So the 10th generation has already started

I think you're ignoring the context of conversation you chimed into, in spite of me reinforcing I was talking about the home console market and all other posts before me directly referencing home console. This is why I say it is not constructive.

We were discussing how concerning the PS5 sales are and then suddenly someone adds the PS Vita to the PS4 total in a way which doesn't contribute to the conversation at all lol

I've never seen anyone here concern themselves over how Nintendo plans to get back to 45m hardware units in Japan, or referring to this current phase as a decline from the DS days. Maybe you do but I have genuinely never seen that talking point.

On an individual system basis I'll take your point that the last big decline was from the PSP to Vita not the PS2 to PS3 (taking handhelds into account). But until Sony releases another handheld, we're taking home console incase me saying "playstation" was too broad.

For me the Switch obviously doesn't have to compete with Wii + DS because there would be huge cross ownership between between Wii + DS. Switch is in fact Nintendo's imperial phase, doesn't matter if units sold are less. It is not a meaningful decline if we're thinking about it critically. Less hardware units is just a reality of offering one convenient purchase instead of two. The userbase is similar if not bigger, just as PS5 userbase at present is similar to PS4 and PS3 at the same time in their life, whilst also being bigger than the Vita, which in itself is probably mostly a userbase shared with the PS4.

But the horse is well and truly dead now, so I'll leave the topic here (for real this time).