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In This Edition
- The impact of Mario Kart
- The Game Business Live free tickets
- EA drops its Black Panther game and studio
Welcome back to The Game Business.
A slightly shorter episode of the Show this week as we gear up for what is shaping up to be three weeks of big industry coverage (plus our first live event… not sure we’ve mentioned that before).
But we’ve still got some insight for you, including a dive into how Mario Kart games sell, plus we give our reaction to EA closing Cliffhanger Games and halting production on its Black Panther game.
You can watch it all above, or check out my handy written version below.
Enjoy!
Nintendo might need more than Mario Kart to drive Switch 2 hype
Nintendo Switch 2 will be here this time next week. And I’m a little concerned about its momentum going into launch.
There’s been some negativity around the pricing, the perceived lack of innovation, the specs, and the game key cards… but for me, I can’t help but feel the bigger issue is its launch line-up.
We obsess over the details before a console comes out. Is it $50 too expensive? Do the specs match up to that other thing? Is there enough storage? Does the box art look different enough? But once the console is in our hands and we’re playing it, most of that tends to melt away. The first Switch was, to some people, a pricey underpowered games machine with fiddly controllers, but nobody cared much about that when they saw The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
It's always about the games. And with Nintendo consoles, it is always about the Nintendo games. And for the launch of Switch 2 that means one game in particular: Mario Kart World.
Now, I have played Mario Kart World, and it’s great. It’s filled with new moves and tricks, an open world you can explore and a knockout mode which might just be the best thing the franchise has done since the 1992 original. I had a blast.
But will it sell consoles?
Mario Kart World has a pretty big competitor in the form of, well, Mario Kart 8: Deluxe. The Switch game has sold over 68 million copies, and continues to sell millions every single year. It is still immensely fun to play, it has nearly 100 tracks and almost 50 characters. It’s quite the complete package.
That’s one challenge. But I also have a theory about the franchise that poses another: Mario Kart is incredibly successful because it is everyone’s second game. And I mean, everyone’s. People might buy a Nintendo machine for Zelda or Pokémon or Animal Crossing or Bayonetta… and then they get Mario Kart, too.
I am not convinced Mario Kart is a system seller by itself. It may be a bigger series than Zelda, but it doesn’t inspire the same devotion. Zelda fans stampeded across the E3 show floor in 2016 for a brief taste of Breath of the Wild. It’s the perfect franchise to launch a console, because it appeals to the sort-of people most likely to rush out to buy a whole machine just to play one game.
Mario Kart isn’t quite that. It doesn’t demand the same urgency as a Zelda. It’s a game that can wait.
Mario Kart World might be different. It does seem to have more depth and variety to it. But until people discover that, it’s hard to get excited about it. Even harder when you consider there’s not going to be any reviews until after launch (although we should get some extensive previews)
I don’t normally trade in feelings and theories. I like my numbers. What is my theory actually based on? Where are my assumptions around Mario Kart’s audience coming from?
So, I decided to challenge all of this. And I called Dorian Bloch, the games lead at UK chart tracker NielsenIQ, to get some insight.
Bloch has been tracking UK video game sales for decades. He has insight into every Mario Kart game released (on a console, anyway). And the UK is an interesting market, because it is actually one of Nintendo’s more challenging territories. In the UK, the Wii was beaten by the Xbox 360 during that generation, and the Switch is unlikely to outsell the PS4. If Mario Kart works here, you have to imagine it can work anywhere.
“For all the promised innovation, the core experience of Mario Kart hasn’t really changed for 33 years, so it’s hard to get too excited. Even if this one does feature a playable cow.”
Mario Kart is a dominant game on almost all Nintendo platforms released in the UK. Mario Kart was the best-selling game on the SNES, Game Boy Advance, Wii, Wii U and Switch, No.2 on the GameCube and No.4 on the N64 and DS. The first five Mario Kart games sold to between 17 - 24% of owners of their respective consoles, which is obviously impressive, but things have spiked since then. 45% of Wii owners bought Mario Kart Wii, 61% of 3DS players have Mario Kart 7, and a whopping 72% of Wii U owners in the UK have Mario Kart 8. On Switch, Mario Kart 8: Deluxe has a 48% attach rate, too.
So Mario Kart is very popular, we know that. But where it differs to, say, a Zelda, is that it’s success tends to happen over time. Nintendo games often have what we call a ‘long tail’, but that’s particularly true of Mario Kart. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe sold more in its fourth year than it did in its first year globally, for example.
In the UK, Mario Kart 8: Deluxe is the best-selling game on Switch. But when it launched (just a few weeks after the console came out) its opening sales were 23% lower than what Breath of the Wild managed the month before.
So Mario Kart games sell well, but over time. I also asked Bloch if there is any evidence of Mario Kart boosting sales of the hardware. And the results are a little hard to judge.
He told me that the N64 game didn’t really impact the console’s performance much. And that Mario Kart: Double Dash on GameCube launched just a few weeks after a significant price cut on the console, which had a more meaningful impact on the sales.
The 3DS game (Mario Kart 7) coincided with an improved performance for the handheld, but it was aided by a price drop a few months earlier and the launch of Super Mario 3D Land.
Where we can see a more direct correlation between Mario Kart and console sales is on Wii and Wii U. Bloch said that Mario Kart Wii had a ‘massive effect’ on Wii sales at launch, and the official Wii U Mario Kart 8 bundle would end up representing 22% of all Wii U consoles sold (although there was, admittedly, not a lot of Wii U consoles sold).
Mario Kart bundles often do well. The official Mario Kart 7 3DS bundle accounted for between 5% and 6% of all 3DS consoles sold, and the same is true of the various Mario Kart 8: Deluxe/Switch bundles. And actually 10% of all Mario Kart 8: Deluxe games sold were part of bundles, and a whopping 22% of Mario Kart 7 sales were via bundles, too.
But it’s worth noting that a lot of these bundles were part of price promotions. Most of those Switch Mario Kart bundles were launched at Black Friday, for example, with the game included for no extra cost.
I’d be surprised if Mario Kart World doesn’t end up being Switch 2’s most successful game. But I feel it needs to deliver something special if it’s to drive early momentum single-handedly. For all the promised innovation, the core experience of Mario Kart hasn’t really changed for 33 years, so it’s hard to get too excited. Even if this one does feature a playable cow.
Of course, it’s not all about the June 5 launch. You could argue it’s not even mostly about June 5. The console is going to have a big first week and month. It’s about what happens next. And this year Nintendo has a decent slate, including a new Donkey Kong, Metroid and Pokémon (albeit those last two are also on the original Switch).
And although the rest of the slate beyond that is a little vague (for now), we know there’s a blockbuster Mario movie due next year, and a live action Zelda adaptation planned for the year after that. And it will be Switch 2 that threads all of these IP expansion projects together.
But at this point, less than seven days from launch, I can’t help by feel there’s something missing from that Switch 2 launch. And that thing is a big Nintendo game that isn’t called Mario Kart.
The Game Business Live is nearly here
We are just over a week away from our first live event at The GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles.
It’s free to all you lovely TGB readers. So if you’re in LA on June 9 and want to hear from some insightful speakers, you can apply for tickets right here.
What speakers you ask? Well, we have Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, Build A Rocket Boy leader Leslie Benzies, Blizzard executives’ Shannon Williams and Peiwen Yao, Circana director Mat Piscatella, Wizards of the Coast president John Hight, AGBO's games expert Pete Wanat and Netflix Games general manager Lisa Burgess.
Meanwhile…
EA has closed its newly formed Seattle-based studio Cliffhanger games, and cancelled its Black Panther project. EA is also working on another Marvel game based on the Iron Man franchise, which is being made by EA Motive, the team responsible for the Dead Space remake and Star Wars Squadrons. Marvel games have had a tough run in the PC and console space, with other high profile releases such as The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Marvel’s Midnight Suns struggling to find an audience. The big exception, of course, being Insomniac’s smash-hit Spider-Man games.
The former CEO and co-founder of Ready At Dawn, Ru Weerasuriya, has formed a new studio in the South of France with game developer and writer Nico Augusto. The new company is called Atlantis Studio and it is working on games built for Unreal Engine 5 for PC and consoles.
Apple has bought a games studio! It’s acquired RAC7, the two-person team behind the Apple Arcade title Sneaky Sasquatch. The tech giant described the acquisition as a ‘unique circumstance’.
PlanetPlay is launching a Green Games Showcase during Summer Game Fest. The event takes place on June 7 and will be hosted by our good friend Will Freeman. Studios taking part include Amazon Games, Team17, Lockwood Publishing, Sharkmob, Netspeak Games and Wicked Saints Studios. The not-for-profit organisation also plans to raise $300,000 by June 30 in order to planet 50,000 trees.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has sold 3.3 million units in 33 days, developer Sandfall Games revealed. Which is a heck of a coincidence.
The US Federal Trade Commission has finally dropped its litigation against Microsoft over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The firm, which sought to block the deal, lost its appeal earlier in the month.
Patrick O’Luanaigh, the CEO of VR game developer and publisher nDreams, has stepped down after 19 years. He will stay around as non-exec chairperson, while chief development officer Tomas Gillo steps into his CEO shoes.
There is going to be an Elden Ring movie. Developer FromSoftware has partnered with A24 to produce the movie, which is being directed by 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later scribe Alex Garland. Garland has experience in video games having written Ninja Theory titles Enslaved and DmC: Devil May Cry. He’s also a seasoned director, and helmed 2014’s Ex Machina, 2018’s Annihilation and 2024’s Civil War.
That’s it for today. Join us next week as we delve into the latest goings-on at Unity and Epic Games. And that’s all before the arrival of Nintendo Switch 2 and Summer Game Fest. It’s going to be a busy few weeks. Thank you for reading.
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