Yea, my experience is that the Japanese companies tend to pay more attention to the home market. Not that they neglect the international market, but feedback/sales trends from the home market seems to have greater weight in their decision making.
Article misleading, the data is based on Valve own hardware. This means nothing if Valve can and has altered the data they own to look like they are gaining traction.
I’m not really surprised by this. It took so long for the PS5 to actually be available over here (it still can be hard to find some of them - the electronics store near me has base PS5s available, but the cheaper digital only one has been sold out for months) that people started getting PCs.
Sony wanted to focus on the western market, and now, well, a good chunk of the Jp market they took for granted is responding by getting PCs.
Told you, that getting Touhou on Steam was the mystical blocker between Steam and Japanese Growth. Completely unrelated variables in practice, but the spirits just work that way.
Based on what I've read, even though Valve had a real, public launch of the Steam Deck late last year, it didn't particularly sell too well as the Japanese market found it a bit expensive. But that information was early this year so sales probably picked up since then.