Mario Kart Tour

» see mariokarttour.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Mario Kart Tour launched on 25 September 2019 for iOS and Android and took ten million downloads on the first day. By the end of the first week it had 90.1 million, which was a record for a Nintendo mobile game and roughly six times what Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp had managed. The first month closed at 123.9 million downloads against $37.4 million in spending, the largest opening Nintendo had ever had on a phone.

The game itself was built by Nintendo EPD with DeNA doing the service side, and it ran on a two-week cycle of themed tours named after real cities. Everything you raced with came out of a gacha pipe, down to the gliders. A Gold Pass at $4.99 a month unlocked 200cc and some extra rewards. All of this sat around a racing game whose console versions you buy once and own, which was the tension the thing never resolved.

Money came in steadily and then stopped climbing. Monthly in-app revenue held around five or six million dollars through 2020 and 2021. Across 2022 it slid to roughly three million a month and kept going down from there. New content ended on 4 October 2023, after which the game cycled tours it had already run. By the summer of 2026 it was taking in something like $650,000 a month, which for Nintendo is a rounding error with a support cost attached.

Nintendo announced the end on 8 July 2026 and suspended ruby sales and new Gold Pass subscriptions the same day. The service went down at 11pm Pacific on 29 September, which was six in the morning UTC on the 30th and the afternoon in Japan. AppMagic's final estimate put the run at 276 million downloads and $268.5 million, with 39 percent of the money from American players and 26 percent from Japanese ones.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a download was worth ~

Divide the revenue by the installs and you get 97 cents per download across the entire life of the game. That is the free-to-play bargain stated plainly. Almost everybody paid nothing while a small number of people paid a great deal, and the arithmetic still worked, because 276 million installs is a number no paid game has ever come near.

What it did not beat was the console business it was advertising. Nintendo spent seven years running a live service to produce about a quarter of a billion dollars, while the Switch version of the same franchise kept selling at full price with no servers to keep warm. No replacement has been announced, and the phone portfolio has been shrinking for years.

~ nothing to preserve ~

Everything in Mario Kart Tour ran through a server, so when the server went off the game became an icon. Nintendo confirmed there were no plans for an offline version and that players would not be able to look at their own collections afterward. Unspent rubies were not refunded. Lapsed Gold Pass months were not refunded either.

This is the company with the most carefully maintained back catalog in the industry, the one that will happily sell you a 1985 platformer again. Its phone games have gone the other way, one after another: Miitomo, Pokemon Rumble Rush, Dr. Mario World, Dragalia Lost and now the biggest of them.

~ from where i sat ~

Nintendo hardware was never the default in Turkey the way it was in America or Japan. The machines that mattered where I grew up were PCs, and the social center of gaming between 2002 and 2005 was the internet cafe, where the thing on every screen was Counter-Strike. A kart racer on a Nintendo console was something you read about rather than something your friends had.

By 2019 I was in my mid thirties, working as an engineer, and the proposition on offer was a gacha wheel on a phone. I downloaded nothing. The interesting part of this grave for me is not the game, it is the shape of the exit: a product with 276 million installs that cannot be run on any machine anywhere, because the only copy that ever existed was on somebody else's hardware.

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