Mario Kart Tour Ends

Nintendo has announced today that Mario Kart Tour will cease to exist at the end of September. And this time there won't be a way of playing the game offline, like there is with the Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp - Complete Edition. It doesn't really affect me, because I have only tried the game once and didn't like it, but it's an interesting view into the nature of such service games.

First of all, this sucks for everyone who has invested in the game somehow. But let that be a lesson learned to not invest into this form of gaming, where your ability to play the game depends on some online service that is likely to shut down once the game stops being profitable. You want to stay as far away from it as possible.

(And I perfectly know it's not easy to resist. If Nintendo were to release a Zelda mobile game with micro transactions, I would still play it. And as a fan of classic Arena Shooters, I'm also still playing Quake Champions, where I had recently praised Bethesda for keeping it alive, as the franchises has reached its 30th anniversary. But with this week's lay-offs from Microsoft, things are looking very bad for the game. More on that later.)

Free-to-play became a new standard for multiplayer games, because everyone is doing it and a price tag is therefore creating a barrier. But I can still play those Arena Shooters from the old days, because the community is keeping them alive. And I can still play Mario Kart Wii whenever I want, with community mods even online.

Anyway, the silver lining is that a lot of the contents from Mario Kart Tour found their way into either Mario Kart 8 Deluxe via the Booster Course Pass, or into Mario Kart World. The latter mainly got the characters and costumes, where hopefully they will add more of them in the future. It would be nice to finally have Dixie Kong playable in a console Mario Kart game. And all-but-one of the exclusive courses made it into Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, where they are preserved. Only the Piranha Plant Pipeline (also known as Pipe Canyon) will be fully lost.

Well, three years ago I was an advocate of a second Booster Course Pass to truly preserve as much as possible, but what we got was already quite good. And the lost course will eventually return in the future, maybe already as DLC for Mario Kart World. It is even in the current rotation of Mario Kart Tour, where it may be the last chance to play the Piranha Plant Pipeline in the game. But best not to start now...