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Nintendo Legend Miyamoto: Mario Needs To Evolve To Survive (cnet.com)
Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's legendary game designer, and his fellow developers were tinkering with a "one-button control scheme" for Mario, where all a player can do is make Mario jump. This dead simple idea became the crux of the company's new Super Mario Run, one of the most anticipated mobile-app games of the year. CNET adds: "We found a great way to make an accessible Mario game and bring it to iPhone and reach a lot of people," Miyamoto said Thursday through his translator. "That's when we decided to make Super Mario Run." Super Mario Run may become a critical next step for Nintendo, which has struggled for years to maintain its relevance in gaming against Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox, as well as a surge of mobile gaming apps. This year, it garnered some attention from Pokemon Go, though it's only partly involved in that game. Now, two more Nintendo mobile gaming apps -- Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem -- are on the way, which could provide the Japanese company with a big boost.
Nintendo's survival does not hinge on a $10 mobile game. Not even close. Your post and this article are poorly informed and borderline inflammatory.
Nintendo's future largely depends on the success of the Switch but even if that goes belly up, Nintendo still has plenty of cash in the bank so stop with the doom and gloom nonsense.
Sega had other issues.
If you go and play those old games from the 8- and 16-bit eras, give Sega's first-party titles a quick comparison to Nintendo's. Not on the merits of hardware specs or any of those fanboi-style "wars", but on the merits of which games are more appealing, more functional, and more polished.
Nintendo's games will slaughter Sega's games in that comparison, hands down, almost every time. Sonic had that "Nintendo" polish. Nearly everything else Sega ever made lacked it. Sure, some of Sega's games are still quite good, but they always lack something in theme or graphic smoothness or memorability.
I remember playing Kid Chameleon back in the day and thinking "this is a really cool game, but I wish I knew why I'm supposed to do this". It was barely more explained than SMB1 (so, not at all), and was far less polished in the control scheme and was therefore harder to like.
Compare Earthbound (a "classic") versus any Phantasy Star game for the Genesis (also generally considered "classics"). Earthbound had mostly complete and readable text with only a few abbreviations. Every Genesis-era Phantasy Star game is riddled with terrible abbreviations in the menu system, to say nothing of the Engrish problems.
Or how about Beyond Oasis? IMO, it's probably the best Genesis game ever. But it can't hold its own against Zelda:LTTP, and barely compares favorably to earlier titles in the Zelda series. It also shares some characteristics with Secret of Mana, Brain Lord, and other third-party SNES titles. But all of those soundly stomp it in a multitude of ways.
And then there's Altered Beast, which was a pack-in with the Genesis for a while. It's terrible. It has horrible lag and serious technical problems ranging from graphic glitching to collision and hit detection failures. And it was a first-party game from Sega, used as an introduction to their product!
Sega's problems went much deeper than just marketing, or just development, or just design. Their problems were all over the place, and it had very little, if anything, to do with any hardware specs. And it's interesting to see that these problems weren't seriously affecting their arcade games. Their home console division just didn't seem to care about QA. And I think that's the reason Sega failed against Nintendo.