Friday’s hour-long Nintendo Direct brought us a modest amount of news for the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., including re-releases and updates of older games, but the hit Switch 2 launch game Mario Kart World was missing in action. Despite Donkey Kong Banaza reveling in a DLC update, and the yet-to-be-released Pokémon Legends: Z-A unfathomably getting a DLC announcement before its launch, the Switch 2’s biggest game appears to be left in the dust.
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It’s a puzzling omission, and although one would hope that Nintendo is working on something big for Mario Kart World for some time in the future, the fact that there was zero mention of the racing game only invites worry from fans.
Mario Kart World Updates Have Already Disappointed Fans
While Mario Kart World was well-received at launch by players and critics, opinions from the fan base have shifted towards more apprehensive and somewhat disgruntled in the months following the game’s release. A late-June update changed how voting for courses worked in online modes, leading players to proclaim that the game has been “ruined” and Nintendo to attempt to alleviate the perceived issue in a patch.
Even so, there are Mario Kart World players who feel that the open-world game is a “downgrade” from previous titles due to some missing features and UI annoyances. All in all, the lack of any acknowledgment of Mario Kart World and its community has left players feeling abandoned.
While it’s possible that Mario Kart World DLC is simply too early in development to show, having a mention during the Nintendo Direct while discussing Super Mario’s 40th birthday would have been a nice nod to devoted fans and a reassurance that there’s more to come. Instead, Nintendo left its fans wringing their hands.
Nintendo Should Support Mario Kart World For Years To Come
Nintendo isn’t really a company that would pursue live service game models like other modern triple-A games companies — the closest might be with Splatoon 3, which had seasonal updates with battle pass-like reward structures. But with Mario Kart being one of the publisher’s biggest IPs, it would be a missed opportunity not to support the new game with consistent content drops.
Looking at the timeline of Mario Kart 8 on Wii U, it took about half a year until the game’s first DLC pack, which included Link as a playable racer and a Zelda-themed track, was released. It only took five months afterward for the Animal Crossing-themed DLC to come out. Then, with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for Nintendo Switch, the Booster Course Pass brought new characters and courses in six waves throughout 2022 and 2023, over five years after the base game launched, with four to five months in between waves.
Perhaps Nintendo wants to follow that model for Mario Kart World and unload an obscene amount of new content in a short period of time, with the caveat being that it wouldn’t come until far in the future. But ideally, Nintendo should look at the game as its own live-service game and keep expanding the, well, world of Mario Kart World.
A great way to retain players and their trust is to have some form of the seasonal model. Players are already convinced that the game is getting some sort of Donkey Kong Bananza DLC, so why don’t they base an entire season on that? It could include young Pauline, Diddy Kong, and more as characters, and maybe add DK Island to the open world as the home for some new tracks. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is getting a Switch 2 Edition in the spring, so that would be another great season — add Wonder Seeds as an item and throw in Prince Florian as a new character.
For better or worse, Mario Kart World has entered a gaming landscape where players are expecting new content all the time. By skipping a Nintendo Direct and a monumental anniversary for Mario, Nintendo isn’t inspiring confidence that anything new will come to the game soon. Hopefully, this panic is temporary, because we’d hate to see this game in our rear-view mirror so soon.
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