Mario Kart World isn’t Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s replacement – here’s why - Nintendo Everything

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe recently received a free update that made a surprising number of changes, considering the original game is 14 years old. This was no doubt done because of the game’s immense sales – it’s moved over 70 million copies, and sold an additional 490,000 in the last quarter alone.

When you open the newly-updated Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on a Nintendo Switch 1, a message pops up informing the player that the game now supports 8-player split-screen multiplayer on Switch 2. This is pretty clever – update your most popular game ever with your newest game console. More importantly, though, it’s interesting to consider Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s update as it relates to Mario Kart World.

We’re surprised to see any update to 8 at all – but its release means that Nintendo is perfectly happy to let it co-exist alongside World as two separate branches of the same franchise. What’s more, though, is that it means Mario Kart World wasn’t really intended to replace Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as the “next” title, but to stand alongside it as its own unique take on the series.

For being a shadow-dropped update to an over decade-old game, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s patch added quite a bit of new features. For one, it now natively supports Nintendo Switch 2’s display and high-resolution TVs, so it’s kind of like a free Switch 2 Edition, in a sense. It also adds the ability to race with eight players on the same screen. It kind of feels like each player’s individual screen would be way too small to be able to see, but it has value if you’re playing on a huge projector screen or something like that. The load times have also been significantly increased, and they’re actually nearly three times faster on Nintendo Switch 2. The title screen loads almost instantly – it’s really impressive. Furthermore, every character has been sped up by the equivalent of one additional coin, which means all of the world record time trials have to be set again. We’re not sure what the point of that was, but Nintendo also made the Boo item work like Mario Kart World and maintain your top speed off-road.

So why make all these changes to an old game when you’ve got Mario Kart World, a brand-new entry they should be promoting instead? I think it’s because Nintendo loves their evergreen titles, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is about as evergreen a game as it gets. As mentioned earlier, despite its age, it sold nearly 500,000 additional copies in the past quarter, and it’s sold over 70 million copies total and is Nintendo’s best-selling game of all time. With that in mind, it makes a lot of sense why Nintendo chose to make Mario Kart World – they didn’t want to make a title that would simply replace the previous one; they wanted to make a new game that could co-exist alongside it.

Indeed, Mario Kart World and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe are so different from each other that you can hop between them depending on what kind of racing experience you want. Mario Kart World’s art style and controls are better, but Mario Kart 8 Deluxe appeals to those who don’t like the open world racing. Not to mention, it’s got an absolutely staggering number of courses to race on with the Booster Course Pass. This way, Nintendo can continue selling copies of both games, but from here on out, we’re sure the company is going to start focusing on new content for Mario Kart World instead. It’d be silly not to, given that the game has already sold over 15 million copies.

We can use this as a possible hint towards the next big Nintendo titles like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros., and the like. The next entries are probably going to be very different, if we had to guess, because their predecessors are already playable on Nintendo Switch 2. Also, Nintendo would like to keep selling Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate alongside the eventual new titles. The only games that sort of go against this mindset are Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3 – when the latter came out, it essentially replaced the former in terms of online matchmaking – but even then, Splatoon 2 includes its own unique story mode and DLC. Players have been trying out Octo Expansion for the first time after Splatoon Raiders – not many, but either way, the single-player content is still selling.

So as strange as it is that Nintendo recently updated Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with new features, it doesn’t mean Mario Kart World is a failure or anything like that. It means the two games are intended to stand together side by side and coexist, and that’s probably going to be the case for future entries in heavy-hitting franchises on Nintendo Switch 2 as well.

What do you think of the two games as they relate to each other? Do you hop between 8 and World depending on the day, or do you stick to just one of them? Let us know in the comments down below. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too much longer for Nintendo to announce some DLC for Mario Kart World.

As for the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe update, we have the full details about it here.

About Review Policy Privacy Policy Contact us