Nintendo has announced today, via Twitter, that the company chose to delay the launch of their upcoming mobile racing title, Mario Kart Tour.
Here’s a rough translation of the tweet: “Mario Kart Tour, our upcoming mobile app, has been delayed. We took this decision in order to furthermore improve the application’s quality, and ensure we can deliver new content for it regularly after launch. The app will now launch in Summer 2019.”
Fans are now left wondering exactly what happened. After all, Mario Kart is one of more popular long-running franchises for Nintendo, and has been consistent in terms of quality and enjoyable gameplay. Nintendo has the following to say to assure fans that the delay was justified “in order to improve quality of the application and expand content offerings after launch.” This essentially means that Nintendo wants the game to draw in a more sustainable audience, and the feedback from testing and development probably reflected a game that was too short or meager on options to achieve that goal.
“As we endeavor to develop future planned applications, we will also focus on continued service operations for applications that have already been released so that consumers can enjoy playing them for a long time,” the company added.
Mario Kart Tour was scheduled to launch on March 2019 for mobile devices, and this delay has now shifted its new release window into fiscal year 2019. And while this likely won’t too major of an impact on financial projections for the company, fans looking forward to taking the iconic racing franchise on the go are still left disappointed.
And while this hiccup will likely slow Nintendo’s long-term plans to push harder into the mobile market, we can be assured that plenty of other iconic game franchises will be making that jump while we wait on Mario Kart Tour.
In other news at the big N, Nintendo recently revealed just how well 2018 went for the game company, and it was thanks in no small part to the Switch. The portable console has managed to sell more than 32 million units, and over 150 million piece of software since launch. These impressive numbers have assured a very profitable few quarters for the company, laying strong foundations for 2019.
