Perhaps consumers there are also tired of paying increasingly high prices for hardware only to be locked into an ecosystem where games not only cost more on average (with sales not being as frequent as on PC), but also go away sometime after the manufacturer moves on to their next console.

I also wonder if the advent of small form factor machines like the various decks, steam machine, more availability mini-ITX boards also served to fuel this uptick.

Watch out Sony. Wonder if Nintendo will see their sales affected by PC one day?

I wonder how much Steams efforts played into this. The Steam Deck launch in Japan was a big deal (at least for me), but didn't sounded like a huge success. They even got a Steam Pal mascot, because Valve thought this is a Japanese thing. This never got a global marketing thing sadly, wish Steam Pal became their mascot and dedicated game (or licensed to others)... I digress.

They also love handhelds, but unfortunately the Steam Deck is huge, it wasn't widely available and there wasn't a big marketing push. And now with those prices its hopeless anyway. What PC games are the most popular in Japan? Steam has https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topsellers/JP/ listing, but that doesn't show the non Steam games (obviously).

I don't blame them when Playstation and Nintendo got greedy.

Over 200 Percent In Four Years

Such a strange metric. No graphs either