Nintendo’s gradual withdrawal from the mobile business continues: Mario Kart Tour will not be getting any new content from October onwards.
As spotted by VGC, Nintendo has told Mario Kart Tour players that “No new courses, drivers, karts, or gliders will be added following the Battle Tour starting 04/10/2023,” through an in-game message. “We hope you continue to enjoy playing Mario Kart Tour,” it added.
All future cups, tours and tournaments in the game will be made up of existing content after October.
It’s no surprise that new content is drying up for Mario Kart Tour; revenue has been declining for years and Nintendo removed the game’s gacha system in October 2022, at which point earnings tailed off even more quickly.
As we’ve reported before, Nintendo’s mobile efforts appear to be fading after it entered the business in 2016 with the release of Super Mario Run, the first time a firstparty Mario platformer had ever appeared on non-Nintendo hardware.
According to numbers we pulled from Appmagic recently, Nintendo has earned $1.5bn from its mobile business since 2016, but revenue has been tailing off since late 2019, just after Mario Kart Tour launched. And now that the kart racer is being wound down, Nintendo is now only updating two of its mobile games regularly: Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
Fire Emblem Heroes still earns Nintendo around $5m per month, according to those Appmagic figures, while Animal Crossing rakes in about $1.5m in monthly earnings. Mario Kart Tour was somewhere in the middle, earning around $3m per month for a while before declining under $2m in monthly earnings more recently.
Nintendo has also previously cancelled puzzler Dr Mario World and RPG Dragalia Lost. It does also occasionally update Super Mario Run, but as a paywalled ‘free-to-start’ game, it is naturally less content-hungry. Nintendo also co-developed walking game Pikmin Bloom with Pokémon Go maker Niantic, but the game is not doing notable numbers.
