I appreciate the spirit of your post. But having lived as a kid back in the NES and SNES eras, I don't think that Sega was the "platform of choice".

If that was true, then why did the SNES sell almost 50 million, while the Genesis sold close to 20 million? No doubt, Genesis was Sega's most popular console. And it certainly had great games, and gave true competition to "The Big N". But at the end of the day, while Sega provided some TRULY great games on Genesis, every huge milestone and BIG game of that entire generation, outside of perhaps Sonic the Hedgehog, came on the Super Nintendo. Whether it was Mario Kart, or F-Zero, or Pilotwings, or Star Fox, or Donkey Kong Country, or Super Metroid, or being the first console to have Street Fighter II, or having a high quality port of Mortal Kombat II (and honestly MK1, regardless of the clear blood nonsense), to all the great SNES rpgs, Mega Man X, Demon's Crest, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Just saying. Nintendo ruled the universe until the N64. And the only reason it stopped then, is becasue they stuck with carts. If they had gone CD with N64, most of those big publishers would have stayed with them, and that includes games like FF7, Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid, etc. likely having been on the N64.

But yes, otherwise, people have been cheering for Nintendo to fail, at least SOME people have, since the N64 era. They survivied, and will continue to survivie. The Wii U will do much better than most are predicting here.

They dont really contribute anything to gaming so it dont matter who they want to see stay or go. I can kinda see why Nintendo is doing Directs now and cutting them out of the equation.

I love this part of your comment.  Very insightful.

Why would the Wii U be a bad 2nd option for home console?  Someone could be playing the PS4 or Xbox One and another person could play with remote play on the Wii U gamepad.  Also, Nintendo owns local multiplayer.  No one else can come close to local multiplayer fun that Nintendo creates.

1st world issues.

For the very same reasons Nintendo fans of old wanted Sega to fail, only back then it was more vicious and Nintendo fans wouldn't be caught dead buying Sonic.

Now nintendo fans like buying Sonic - If/when Nintendo folds and goes third party, gamers on other platforms will buy Mario, it's as simple as that, but if you want the long and short of it, here it is.

Many Sony and Microsoft gamers would play Mario and other Nintendo games, they just don't want to buy a Nintendo console to do it.

They're going to be waiting a long time.

the medial perception was behind the success of Genesis it was hardly build on quality of their games, it was build on medial perception, they understand that to compete with Nintendo they need to invent competent ideology they can't with quality of games, so they invented (it was invention by Sega of America) so called hardcore gaming.

The problem with N64 was not in cartridges it was far deeper, in Japan the problem was their belief that they can control platform holder, success of Sony depend on us, they lived under shadow of giant and they think they can be giant under Sony, the truth is in the end they became neither.

Today the entire Japanese industry is largely irrelevant (with exception of handhelds, exactly the market Nintendo always dominated) and ironically most of what SQUARE producing today can be easily reproduced and distributed on N64

Well, I could see Nintendo succeeding if they went multiplatform. They do have killer games and a lot of second-party studios working for them. I doubt that will ever happen though thanks mostly to their handheld dominance even though Wii U sales are weak. Maybe in ten years, we will see this happen, but for now it will be a pipedream for every non-Nintendo fan.

nintendo is doomed to follow the same path as sega... it will be after this next-gen cycle that nintendo will abandon consoles and focus only on handheld gaming or being third party. I predict Sony PS4 to sell more than Xbox One and Wii U combined.