Is Mario Kart a good game to launch a console?

I have this theory. Mario Kart's incredibly successful because it's everyone's second game. And I mean everyone's second game. You might come in for Zelda or Pokémon or Animal Crossing or Bayonetta or whatever whatever that franchise is that brings you to a Nintendo machine. Then you go and get Mario Kart as [Music] well. Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. We have a slightly shorter episode this week and it is just me. We have no guest host. It's because we're quite busy at the moment at the Game Business Towers. We have quite a lot going on, including a really rammed schedule for next week with with Summer GameFest and State of Unreal. Uh there's also a certain Nintendo Switch 2 console coming out. We'll be talking a little bit more about that today. But also, the big thing for us is we have our live event which is which is occupying a lot of our time and it's starting to shape up very nicely. We've got a whole bunch of really cool talks coming on. We've got the CEO of Twitch, Dan Clansancy. He's going to do a fireside chat with us. We've got Leslie Benzes. He's at Build a Rocket Boy now, but he's best known for GTA 3, 4, 5, Vice City, San

Andreas, and for one of my personal favorites, Space Station Silicon Valley. He's going to be talking about his journey so far. We've got two executives from Blizzard who are here talking about their game Diablo Immortal and the mobile AAA world, Matt Biscatella from Kakan is going to be giving a talk about um the macroeconomic conditions in the US and the impact on on things there. And we have a really cool panel about uh IP and entertainment and video games featuring the president of Wizards of the Coast. John Height, we have Pete Wanet who is from Agbo. They're the production company the Russo brothers are behind. And also Lisa Burgess who's a general manager of Netflix games specializing in kids and you saw the Peppa Pig story we did last week on games and IP crossover. So we've got a cool panel on that and I'm hoping we have two other quite amazing talks. Uh we're just waiting for sign off on them, but it's going to turning out quite well. Well, we've we've sold a lot of tickets. The event is free for the game business readers, listeners, and viewers. So, it's free for you if you are in Los Angeles on June 9th. If you want to come along, go to the gamebus.com. The top of the site,

there's something called TGB Live. Click on that link and it'll tell you everything you need to do in order to apply for a ticket. We'd love to see you there. I'd love to you to be part of our our live recordings on that day. So, as a result of that, we don't have a big show today, but we do still have some things for you. And I wanted to at least uh show up and have a little chat about some of the news that's broken over the last few days. And probably the one that's actually broken most recently, only yesterday that this hit the news was that EA has closed its newly formed Seattlebased studio, Cliffhanger Games, and canceled its Black Panther project. Now, this game was this was only announced in 2023. It's a bit of a disappointing result and it kind of starts a trend of disappointing results in the Marvel video game universe. So, there has been Spider-Man and Spider-Man's been a real huge smash hit, but we've really not seen other superhero games deliver that kind of success. Certainly not since the old Batman Arkham games. In Marvel, we've had the Avengers game from Crystal Dynamics, which ended up being a disappointment and didn't deliver. There

was the Guardians of the Galaxy game which, you know, sold okay, but uh it wasn't a massive massive hit. In DC, the Suicide Squad game was a miss. The Gotham Knights game didn't do particularly well either. Um, even sort of broadly, we had the Marvel Midnight Suns game from 2K, which is actually an excellent, excellent strategy game, but it just didn't resonate. It didn't do very well and was another disappointment from sort of Marvel video game crossovers. Now, there has been success as well as Marvel Rivals last year and and that's doing very well at the moment, of course, but it's clearly a very hard universe in order to succeed in. I actually don't think there's any such thing as a bankable IP at the moment in any form of entertainment, spec especially video games. That doesn't mean that's the reason why this game was canceled. It's worth noting that EA does have another Marvel project in the works at EA Motive. They're working on an Iron Man game. EA Motive, the studio behind the Dead Space remake and Star Wars Squadrons, which if you know those two games, you can imagine why they'd be making an Iron Man title. It's difficult to speculate on what went wrong with the project, where the project was heading, whether there were there was what the milestones were being

hit. You have to assume there was some disappointment there. But, uh, simply just going, "Oh, the game's not working out great, but we'll put it out anyway because Black Panthers are licensed to print money." That simply isn't the case. That isn't the world we inhabit today. Obviously disappointing news and it highlights the challenges in the AAA space and EA has made a load of cuts in recent years um recent weeks in fact but uh uh yeah I I suspect this might be more related to this specific project. It's a disappointing end for the team at Cliffhanger there. Um another new story uh that I don't really have too much to comment on but I thought it was notable to mention is Apple has bought a video game studio. Um Rack 7 RAC 7 is a twoperson team behind the Apple arcade title Sneaky Sasquatch. There are talks here about Apple trying to create some video game based platform um on its on on iOS and this studio might be part of that. Speculation on Bloomberg around that. Um but ultimately the tech giant when just asked uh why they did this they described it as a unique circumstance and it certainly is a unique thing to see Apple do particularly who've been in the press

for video game related reasons that isn't been particularly positive. Those are some of the more interesting stories. We've also seen a new studio open in the south of France called Atlantis Games. It's been co-founded by Ruer Suria. I think I got that right. He formed a studio in the south of France with a game developer and writer Nico Austou. They're making a game in Unreal Engine 5. So PC and console. It's always nice to talk about something positive in the news and it's great to see a new uh studio open up in France as well which is obviously has had a big success in CLA obscure expedition 33. That game has sold 3.3 million units in 33 days according to developer Sanfall Games. It sounds an unlikely statistic considering uh but uh apparently it's true. So um congratulations. That game is doing extremely well. Um what I actually want to talk to you about today is the upcoming release of Nintendo Switch 2. I'm a big Nintendo fan. Anyone that listen to the show knows I'm really into Nintendo and I overthink that console and that that company sometimes. But I have to say I'm starting to feel a

little concerned about the console only a week from launch. It's not because of the price or the perceived lack of innovation in the hardware or the specs or the game key cards or whatever else the internet is crossed about today. There were people in my feed getting crossed about the box art not looking that different. Um but for me there's something far more fundamental that I'm concerned about and that's to do with the game lineup. We obsess over the details before a console comes out. Is it $50 too expensive? Do the specs match up to the other console? Is there enough storage space? You know, these But once the console is in our hands and once we're playing it, most of that stuff tends to melt away. The conversation becomes, how good is this game? Or do how can I afford the console? The first Switch was a pricey, underpowered games machine with fiddly controllers. Let's not forget. But nobody cared much about that when they all booted up Breath of the Wild. So, it's always about the games. And with Nintendo's consoles, it's always about the Nintendo games. And for the launch

of Switch 2, that means one game in particular, which is Mario Kart World. Now, I've played Mario Kart World, and it genuinely is great. It's filled with new moves and tricks, and there's loads of stuff to play with there. It has an open world, which you can explore. I don't know how deep that open world is, but it seems interesting. And it has a knockout mode, which might be the best thing the franchise has done since since it started in 1992. I had an absolute blast with this. Granted, I was surrounded by people whooping and hollering as I was playing the game, which added to the atmosphere a little bit, but it was fantastic. It's a mode where you the last four people, you go through checkpoints and the last four people get knocked out. It was incredible. I had so much fun with it. But as good as it is, will it actually sell consoles? Is it going to drop? Is it generating hype behind that console? You see, Mario Kart World has a pretty big competitor at the moment, and that competitor is Mario Kart 8, specifically Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Now, 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's nearly It has nearly 100 tracks and almost 50 characters. It's quite the complete package. And I have this theory. I've mentioned it on the podcast before, so you haven't if you've not heard it before, I apologize, but Mario Kart's incredibly successful because it's everyone's second game. And I mean everyone's second game. Second game. You might come in for Zelda or Pokémon or Animal Crossing or Bayonetta or whatever, whatever that franchise is that brings you to a Nintendo machine. Then you go and get Mario Kart as well. Um, I'm 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. I I remember vividly the Zelda fans stampeding across the E3 show floor in 2016 for a brief taste of Breath of the Wild. It was, you know, they were queuing for hours to play that game. It's really the perfect franchise to launch a console with cuz it's appeals to the sort of people who are most likely to rush out and buy a machine on day one just to play one game. Mario Kart for me isn't a day one

game, at least not in the same way. It doesn't have that urgency. Its audience is broader and less inclined to get things the moment they come out. Now, Mario Kart World might be different. It might, you know, it's a problem with being an analyst. Um, you can't, you know, you can't factor in innovation. Maybe Mario Kart World is a is a is a break from the norm. And it does seem to have more depth and variety to it. But until people discover that, until they can get hands- on with it, which by the way, um, but until people discover that, it's it's hard to get excited about it. It's even harder when you consider there's not going to be any reviews until after launch. There's no chance of some hype before the machine comes out anyway. Now, I wrote that bit. I put that I wrote that down an opinion piece. You can read it on the website and then I had to stop because I don't normally trade in feelings and theories. Um, I like my numbers. And you'll notice a complete lack of figures in any of the things I just said. What is my theory actually based on? Where are my assumptions around Mario Kart's audience

and its behavior coming from? So, I decided to challenge all of this and I called up Dorian Block. Now, if you don't know Dorian Block, he's the UK, he's the lead basically at Neil Neilson IQ for video games. Now, Block has been tracking the UK video games sales for decades and decades and decades. He has data going back to the 80s. It's incredible. Um, so therefore, he has insight into every single Mario Kart released on console anyway. I'm not including the arcade games or the mobile games on this. And the UK is actually an interesting market. I know it's not the world, but Nintendo doesn't do that well in the UK, at least compared to other markets. In the UK, the Wii was outsold by the Xbox 360. The Wii was the biggest selling games console that generation globally, but not in the UK. The Switch, one of the biggest selling games consoles of all time, potentially going to be the second bestselling game device ever. In the UK, it hasn't even outsold PS4, and it's unlikely to sell out sell PS4 as well. So in my my my brain, if Mario Kart works in the UK, you have to

imagine it can work anywhere. So I asked Dorian, what stats what stats he have about Mario Kart? And look, Mario Kart in the UK as it is around the world is dominant is a dominant game on almost all Nintendo platforms. Super Mario Kart on the SNES, Mario Kart, uh Super Mario Kart on the SNES, 17% of the people who own the SNES own Super Mario Kart. Mario Kart 64, that goes up to 22%. Mario Kart Super Circuit 24% that's a GBA game. Mario Kart Double Dash 23%. So low bit huge proportion of the audience of those consoles own a Mario Kart game. It did drop a little bit for Mario Kart DS. It dropped down to 17% but that's that's still a pretty good figure. After that things absolutely went crazy for Mario Kart. 45% of Wii owners bought Mario Kart Wii. 61% of 3DS players have Mario Kart 7. And frankly, 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, but obviously that's a much much much more successful platform. Um, so Mario Kart is popular. We know that, but where it differs to say a Zelda or 3D Mario is the strength of its performance outside of its launch. Now, Nintendo games do tend to have what we call a long tail. They sell and sell and sell and sell. But that's especially true of Mario Kart. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold more in its second year than its first year. Sold more in its third year than its second year and sold more in its fourth year than its third year. Which means more people bought Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in the fourth year on the market than they did when it first came out. That's that's relatively unheard of in video games. Um, now in the UK, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was a strong launch. It did have a strong launch, but it arrived shortly after the Switch. Breath of the Wild launched on the Switch in March, and Mario Kart launched on the Switch in April. But it still sold 23% fewer units than Breath of the Wild had achieved the month before. It was a strong launch, but it wasn't the strongest. So, I asked Dorian, "What

impact does Mario Kart games have on Nintendo hardware sales?" I also want to ask him about the impact of Mario Kart hardware bundles, cuz there's a lot of those. And let's not forget Mario Kart World, which comes out with the Switch 2. There is a Mario Kart World Switch 2 bundle, which is a quite a good deal. And the data here isn't so clear. Dorian Block told me that the N64 game didn't really impact the conso's performance much. In fact, the only things that really boosted N64 sales were price cuts. Mario Kart Double Dash on Gamecube arrived just a few weeks after a significant price cut on the hardware, which had a more meaningful impact on the sales of that machine. It's not to say Double Dash didn't sell, didn't help there, but it was part of a bigger package of promotion. The 3DS game Mario Kart 7 is a similar story that coincided with improved performance of 3DS, but that was there was also a price drop on the 3DS hardware a few months earlier and the launch of Super Mario 3D Land as well. So, there was quite a few things Nintendo did to try and drive sales of the 3DS. Mario Kart 7 was part of that story, but it wasn't

the only part. Where we can see a more direct correlation between Mario Kart and console sales is actually on the Wii and the Wii U. Block 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. Now, I know that's not a lot of consoles sold. The Wii U was obviously a failure, but almost a quarter of all those consoles that were sold had a Mario Kart bundle involved. Sticking with bundles, the official Mario Kart 7 3DS bundle and the various official Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Switch bundles accounted for between 5 to 6% of those consoles sold. So around 5 to 6% of 3DS sales were of the Mario Kart 7 bundle, and it's the same with the uh the Switch, but for Mario Kart 8, um 10% of Mario Kart 8 Delux's overall sales came from official bundles, whereas 22% of Mario Kart 7 sales came via the 3DS bundle. Those numbers are all quite all over the

place. And so, and it's not particularly conclusive. It doesn't particularly change my theory. Mario Kart bundles can do well. We know that, but they're often part of a bigger deal. Most of those Mario Kart Switch bundles that uh that did pretty well were released around Black Friday when the game was often included at no extra cost. Even next week's Mario Kart World Switch 2 bundle is available at a hefty discount compared with buying the game and the hardware separately. certainly the one that I've pre-ordered. Now, previous Mario Kart games do tend to have decent launches. I'm not suggesting their launches are muted or quiet in any way, but they're not usually amongst Nintendo's fastest selling games, Mario Kart Wii being a slight exception there. Ultimately, my concerns around the Switch 2 remain similar. There's a lack of buzz around the imminent arrival of Nintendo's first console in 8 years, and perhaps unfair for me to put all that on Mario Kart's door. The console has faced criticism online for its pricing and its game key cards and all sorts of things. And the world is in a tough spot right now. It's hard to get

too excited about things when sometimes for some of us it can feel quite bleak out there. But also ultimately what defines new consoles are the games on it. That's what gets us really excited. That's what gets all the hype going. And when the big launch game is one with a core gameplay experience that's largely stayed the same for the best part of 33 years, it's hard to get too excited. Even if that's one, even if this game does feature a playable cow, which I have to say is probably worth the entry point alone. Now, look, I know I'm saying all this, I'm talking about the launch, and it's not all about the launch. You could argue it's not even mostly about the launch. It's going to be a big week for Nintendo. There's going to be a lot of consoles sold. In fact, it may well be, and in fact, fully expected to be the fastest selling video game console of all time. What matters is what happens next. And this year, Nintendo has a decent slate. I'm not sure it's as strong as the Switch One slate was in its first year, but there will be a new Donkey Kong game. There is a new Metroid game. There is a Pokemon game coming out, although the last two Metroid and Pokemon are also on the

original Switch. We don't know much else about the schedule yet. There is reports of a Nintendo Direct soon. But we also do know there's a blockbuster Mario movie next year and a major liveaction Zelda adaptation planned for the year after that. And Switch 2 will be the machine that threads all of those IP expansions projects together. going to be the device that unders sit that sits underneath all of these new developments, whether it's theme parks, new stores, movies, as well as games. But at this point, less than 7 days from the launch of a new Nintendo console, there's a tangible lack of buzz around it. At least to me, and I trust me, I'm somebody that would be very attuned to the buzz. And I can't help but feel there's something missing. And the thing that I think is missing is a big Nintendo game that isn't called Mario Kart. there are. That's my opinion for the week. Um, I'm saying all that. I'm getting it. I'm very excited for it. And the game is pretty good. And hopefully that Donkey Kong game will also be pretty good when it lands in July. I wasn't too worn over by it when I played

it uh at the Nintendo event. But um there's only so much you can tell from a short demo like that. That's kind of all we have time for. Uh well, we have more time. It's all we have for you today, the Game Business Show. Please do stay tuned to us cuz next week it is going to get busy. We've got some really really cool stories and features for you including another Switch 2 uh piece sort of early next week and we will be covering everything from uh Summer GameFest as well. In fact, in the week of Summer Gamefest, you're going to hear a lot from us. Um not just about our live event. We will be there across PlayStamefest, the Xbox showcase as well. So stay tuned to the gamebus.com for that. And in fact, make sure to put your email in if you haven't already to be able to receive all the latest updates from that event. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.