Nintendo confirms that Mario Kart is coming to mobile!

Nintendo has announced that it’s definitely going to be releasing a version of Mario Kart for mobile devices. The game will be titled Mario Kart Tour and is set to be released at some point in the next financial year. This gives Nintendo plenty of time to get things right as the next financial year will run until March 2019.

While there are no other details about the game (the announcement was limited to a tweet from the official Nintendo account), Nintendo’s previous mobile releases could give us some clues.

Nintendo first stepped into the smartphone games arena in 2016 with the release of Miitomo. The first Mario-based game was Super Mario Run which came later in the year. Rather than simply porting an existing Mario game, this was a version of Super Mario that was uniquely mobile.

In terms of pricing, while Nintendo charged $9.99 for Super Mario Run (with a free-to-play demo), later releases by the company have used a free-to-play with add-ons model. It is impossible at this stage to know what pricing structure Nintendo will go for with Mario Kart Tour, although by all accounts, the company didn’t hit its sales targets with Super Mario Run.

When it is released, Mario Kart Tour won’t be the only recent version of Mario Kart. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was released on its incredibly popular Switch console last year to almost universally positive reviews.

The fact that Super Mario Run was so popular, not to mention Nintendo’s success over the years in the handheld game market, means that expectations for Mario Kart Tour are sure to be sky-high.