“The mobile market is where the action is these days. Why won’t Nintendo do the smart thing and put its games on iOS or Android platforms?”

It’s probably the most frequently-asked question outside of “Where do babies come from?” Here’s the simplest answer: Nintendo won’t put its games on iPhones, iPad, smartphones or tablets because it’s not the smart thing to do. Nintendo’s games still sell its systems, which grants the company a degree of control few game studios have.

The First King of the Portable Mountain

Nintendo’s an old company. As far as its history as a console manufacturer goes, it’s practically ancient. Under the guidance of former president Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo helped North America’s cold games industry come roaring back to life with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. The company has since witnessed (and instigated) a lot of change in the industry, and it’s seen a lot of competitors come and go.

The industry never been as competitive as it is now, and it’s thanks to the advent of mobile phones and tablets. If you were to go back ten years in time and tell the world that a phone manufactured by Apple is the greatest threat to Nintendo’s prosperity, you probably wouldn’t find a single person who’d believe you. Potential competitors have long taken on Nintendo head-to-head by designing consoles and handheld gaming systems. Since the birth of the Game Boy in 1989, an endless parade of imitators has followed, including the Atari Lynx, Sega’s Game Gear, the Turbo Express, Tiger’s Game.com, Sony’s PSP, and many more.

None of the systems ever managed to touch Nintendo’s place at the top of the handheld market until the smartphone, particularly Apple’s iPhone, rose into popularity. Steve Jobs encroached on Nintendo’s speciality, and he’d done it through the iPhone’s secondary functions.

Now, Nintendo has to break a sweat to keep the Nintendo 3DS at the top of kids’ wish lists. This is not exactly a bad thing, since the threats of the iOS and Android market have already forced the game maker to innovate. Nevertheless, we’ve grown so accustomed to Nintendo being at the head of the food chain that many of us ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t Nintendo give up on the sinking handheld console market and publish its games on the iPhone? It’d make a ton of money!”

Short Term Prosperity Before a Slow Death

If Nintendo were to make a Pokemon or Super Mario game for the iPhone, that game would doubtlessly sell millions. It’d be a fantastic boost for the company in the short term, but in the long term, turning its properties loose on Apple’s iOS could mean the death of the company.

Nintendo doesn’t have to worry about its immediate future. It has plenty of money in the bank. More than ten billion USD as of 2012, in fact. Even though Nintendo’s Wii U (its Wii successor) hasn’t been burning up the sales charts, the company has a pretty big cushion of money to fall back on if things don’t improve for the system.

Thing is, the Wii U’s fortunes probably will improve for the same reason the Nintendo 3DS finally got around to selling over 33 million units since its shaky start: Must-have games began trickling in, and more than a few of them were from Nintendo itself. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, Fire Emblem: Awakening, and Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D are available exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS, and people have bought the 3DS to play them. Animal Crossing: New Leaf is an especially noteworthy system-seller. It wouldn’t make sense to dilute any of these properties by peddling them on smartphones, tablets, or systems not designed and sold by Nintendo.

Sega: A Bad Mentor

Moreover, if Nintendo wasn’t free to design its games around its own hardware, its creative spark could potentially dim. Sega produced its best games for its Dreamcast system at the start of the new millennium (including critically-acclaimed titles like Shenmue, Space Channel 5, Seaman, and Jet Set Radio), but it stagnated when it left hardware development. The result was a chain of lackluster Sonic the Hedgehog games that permanently damaged the reputation of its once-celebrated mascot. Sonic is on the rebound and has starred in a few high-quality games since his initial fall, but the Sega that gave us cool new properties like Panzer Dragoon and Samba de Amigo has been reduced to a legacy that only lives on in the backgrounds of the multi-platform Sonic & Sega racing games.

It would be heartbreaking to see Nintendo forced to churn out truncated mobile versions of its best properties, no matter how good an idea it seems to be at first glance. A string of bad decisions and failed hardware platforms forced Sega out of the hardware game, however, and Nintendo is nowhere near that level of distress.