I like the article's point about how when genres reach maturity, they become attractive to an increasingly specialized, increasingly small audience. Flight sims are perhaps the most extreme example: they were hugely popular in the 80s and early 90s, but by the mid-90s they basically required you to be able to actually fly a plane, which was not so popular.
I love how Nintendo were so open about their strategy, even before it became an obvious success, but the cognitive dissonance is so strong that even today many people (particularly the stereotypical "hardcore gamer") still actively refuse to understand it and will go to great lengths to explain away reality.