Nintendo Confirms Mario Kart Tour Shutdown After 7 Years, No Offline Version Offered

Nintendo volition unopen down smartphone racer Mario Kart Tour this September, aft 7 years of service.

A announcement posted connected societal media this greeting revealed that the iPhone and Android crippled volition cease operating connected September 29 astatine 11pm Pacific time. The crippled primitively launched successful September 2019, and is 1 of Nintendo's fewer remaining mobile games inactive successful operation.

"We sincerely convey the galore players who person loved and supported the crippled since work began truthful agelong ago," Nintendo wrote successful a blog station with a fewer much details connected the game's demise. "Thank you for playing Mario Kart Tour."

Nintendo shutting down its smartphone games is thing caller — galore of them person present been scrapped. But Mario Kart Tour lasted longer than most, fed into improvement of tracks for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's Switch enlargement pass, and was — for a while, astatine slightest — highly lucrative.

The fiscal occurrence of Mario Kart Tour was initially marred successful controversy, however, arsenic it relied connected gacha-style mechanics to unlock caller karts and characters. After important backlash, Nintendo replaced this strategy with a much modular point store successful 2022, arsenic good arsenic a subscription service.

Today, the merchantability of in-game currency has present been suspended, arsenic person automatic renewals for the game's Gold Pass subscription. All players volition soon beryllium capable to bask subscription-level benefits for the remainder of the game's life.

However, dissimilar the shutdown of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Nintendo is not preparing a standalone offline variation of the crippled for players to power implicit to aft Mario Kart Tour's servers unopen down. "An offline mentation is not scheduled for release," reads an highly little FAQ leafage connected the matter. It's a shame, arsenic this volition permission respective Mario Kart tracks unsocial to the crippled unplayable forever.

Perhaps the deficiency of an offline mentation is down to the information that Mario Kart World is seen arsenic a cardinal operator for the uptake of Switch 2 — and Nintendo would overmuch alternatively you acquisition a console to play that, whereas an all-new Animal Crossing crippled inactive seems years away.

Regardless, with Mario Kart Tour shutting down, Nintendo's smartphone crippled catalog volition shrink further. Fire Emblem Heroes and Shadows stay operational, arsenic does Super Mario Run. And past there's Pikmin Bloom, which is mostly tally by Pokémon Go developer Niantic.

Still, Nintendo has not abandoned its smartphone ambitions entirely. Earlier this twelvemonth it launched Pictonico!, an app that lets you crook images from your camera rotation into WarioWare-style minigames.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You tin scope Tom astatine [email protected] oregon find him connected Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social