Short answers, pulled from the story.
Media Create is a Japanese company that gathers and analyzes data from the digital entertainment industry, with a focus on the Japanese console gaming market. Its business operations include publishing, market research, and consulting, and it releases "The Annual Game Industry Report" every year.
Media Create updates its official Japanese website every Friday, Japan Standard Time, with the top fifty selling video games from the previous week and hardware sales figures for a wide range of consoles.
Media Create tracks hardware sales for the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite, Wii, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP, Game Boy Micro, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox, and Xbox 360.
Media Create competes with Enterbrain's Famitsu and MediaWorks' Dengeki PlayStation. All three firms track Japanese game sales independently, which means any given title will have three different reported figures at the same time.
Yes. Nintendo cites Media Create sales data during its conferences and presentations, making it one of the most publicly endorsed sources for Japanese gaming market figures.
Only the top twenty software sales figures and hardware rankings are published for free. Sales data for games ranked 21 through 50, and for titles beyond the top fifty, require a paid subscription. The English-language website shows only placement rankings and hardware percentage rankings, not raw sales numbers.