Nintendo Is Done With Mario Kart Tour

Oliver Brandt
·2 min read
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Mario Kart Tour Mario and Luigi racing

Back in 2019, Nintendo released a mobile version of Mario Kart called Mario Kart Tour, and it took the world by storm. And by “took the world by storm,” I mean it was a fairly decent game that performed okay but never really set the charts on fire, but given it was a gacha game, it probably made more than enough money for Nintendo. Now, Nintendo is pulling the plug, or at least saying goodnight to Tour for the time being.

A notice in Mario Kart Tour, as posted to Twitter by well-known dataminer and software engineer OatmealDome, has confirmed that Nintendo will no longer be adding new content to the game in the future. As of the Battle Tour, which is set to start on October 4, 2023, all tours in the game will be repeated content, and no new courses, drivers, karts, or gliders will be added to the game.

Mario Kart Tour has had a barrage of updates since its introduction in 2019. In the four years since the game launched, it’s seen dozens of characters, carts, and courses added, alongside an absurd amount of costumes and cosmetics, as you’d expect for a game like this.

Some of that content – namely the courses – has even made it over to the main series console games. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch started getting new courses in 2022, five years after the game launched, because the content in Mario Kart Tour was seemingly fairly easy to port over. The result was courses that aren’t quite up to the visual scratch of the base game courses, but was good enough and abundant in numbers, with 48 courses added throughout the six waves of the Booster Course Pass.

It’s led some (namely me) to believe that Tour was a self-sustaining content farm for the main games, and this suspicion gets even more suspicious when you look at the timing for Tour’s content sunsetting. The final wave of DLC for Mario Kart 8 is set to be released before the end of the year, and many are expecting it in October or November… which is around the time Tour will stop getting new content too.

Of course, the reality is likely that Nintendo saw a bunch of good content and found a way to monetize that content with its Switch user base, but nobody outside of Nintendo will ever really know for sure.