'Mario Kart Tour' to Follow 'Super Mario Run's' Launch Model of Including Free Content to Start With

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Monday, February 12, 2018

"Mario Kart Tour" will be bringing the ever popular party racing game to mobile devices, and Nintendo is set to deliver it in about 13 months or so. Developer DeNA, who is leading the development of the game, also hinted that "Mario Kart Tour" will start with limited free content, just like "Super Mario Run."

"The checkered flag has been raised and the finish line is near. A new mobile application is now in development: Mario Kart Tour! #MarioKartTour Releasing in the fiscal year ending in March 2019," Nintendo announced on Twitter on Feb. 1.

March of 2019 may be just a bit over a year away, but Nintendo is already announcing their newest foray into the mobile games market. This kind of early announcement has been part of why "Super Mario Run" went on to become the top iOS game in its category last year.

DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu also announced in a Japanese press release last Friday, Feb. 9, that "Mario Kart Tour" will be following the model that "Super Mario Run" launched with, according to GameBiz via Game Informer. That is, "Mario Kart Tour" will be free to download, with a small subset of game content available at no charge.

Getting the complete game, as well as future updates, will then depend on microtransactions, a model that Nintendo and DeNA term as "Free to Start."

It may have been a surprising development for Nintendo fans, as even the company itself admits that "Super Mario Run" and its "Free to Start" model has only turned in a modest amount of profit. "Super Mario Run" has produced about $30 million in revenue, according to 9 to 5 Mac, with just a tiny fraction of its user base actually buying the whole game.

A complete "Super Mario Run" purchase runs at $10, and only 3 percent of the 90 million downloads of the game eventually converted into a sale for Nintendo.