Nintendo is at it again with trying to break into the mobile scene as the Japanese company announces the development of "Mario Kart Tour."
Officially announced through a relatively simple Tweet, "Mario Kart Tour" is Nintendo's latest attempt at getting in on that mobile market that has taken the world by storm, especially in Japan.
Unfortunately, there is not much to go on as of yet. The only things that Nintendo has revealed so far are the game's title and expected release within the next fiscal year. To anyone who is not too business savvy, that means anytime from April 2018 to March 2019, which is quite a long length of time.
Assuming Nintendo does not release anything else before this, "Mario Kart Tour" will be the developer's fourth attempt at the mobile market and, so far, its standing has been fairly decent in terms of its mobile projects, though some games fare better than others.
"Miitomo" was an interesting title that, on launch, created a lot of buzz but did not stay afloat for long. In fact, Nintendo has just announced that it would be shutting down the "Mittomo" servers in May.
"Super Mario Run" was a free-to-try title that took the world by storm generating millions of downloads within the first week. But, because of its free nature, it did not really give Nintendo that much profit in the end.
"Fire Emblem Heroes" may not have as large of a player base as "Super Mario Run," but it definitely made up for it in revenue. Despite having a somewhat niche audience, because of its nature of being a gacha game with a lot of microtransactions, "Heroes" had reportedly made more money than "Mario" despite only having a tenth of the download numbers.
Finally, the most recent release was "Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp." While there has been no news regarding its profit margin, it did manage to get 15 million downloads within its first week, making it the second largest mobile launch for Nintendo.
Now the only question is if "Mario Kart Tour" will be a true-to-form "Mario Kart" game or will twist the concept sideways the same way "Super Mario Run" did for regular Mario. Only time will tell as Nintendo has yet to reveal more details.
