Nintendo’s Mario Kart Tour to shut down in September

Nintendo is closing down its mobile racing game, Mario Kart Tour.

In a brief message posted to social media this morning, the developer confirmed service for Mario Kart Tour will end on September 29 at 11pm PT (8am on September 30 CEST) and thanked players for their support.

As a result of the closure, in-game currency ruby sales have already ended, but players can continue to spend them in the Spotlight Shop, Mii Racing Suit Shop, and Coin Rush until the game shuts down in September.

Similarly, Nintendo has also stopped all automatic Gold Pass subscription renewals and suspended new subscriptions. Players can “continue to enjoy Mario Kart Gold Pass benefits” – albeit without the continuous-subscription ones – and all players can make the most of Gold Pass benefits for free from August 4.

Mario Kart Tour released with a bumpy start back in 2019, when Nintendo encountered considerable resistance to its gacha-style features. According to AppMagic estimates, downloads peaked on September 26 2019, when it was downloaded 14.7m times in 24 hours. In its first week on sale, it was downloaded 54m times, and after its first month it had racked up 81.8m downloads.

Mario Kart Tour has been downloaded over 274m times and has generated $268.4m for Nintendo, says AppMagic. For some time now, it hasn’t been getting any new content, but AppMagic suggests the game generated $650,000 for Nintendo in the last 30 days.

As we’ve reported before, Nintendo’s mobile efforts appear to be fading after it entered the business in 2016 with the release of Super Mario Run, the first time a firstparty Mario platformer had ever appeared on non-Nintendo hardware.

Nonetheless, back in February 2025, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa insisted the developer/publisher had not given up on mobile, stressing it had “distributed mobile apps worldwide, including in regions where dedicated gaming consoles do not reach” and noting that Nintendo’s apps had been downloaded over 900m times as of September 2024.

According to AppMagic’s most recent estimates, Nintendo Japan is thought to have generated around $1.59bn through its apps, and 877.5m downloads. Fire Emblem Heroes was its first billion-dollar mobile game.

Nintendo’s most recent mobile launch was photo-based minigame collection Pictonico, which was released on iOS and Android back in May.