Key Takeaways
- Nintendo is offering a holiday bundle that includes the Switch OLED, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online membership.
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe remains popular with a broad appeal, and it has been an overall massively successful title for Nintendo.
- Nintendo plans to unveil the successor to the Switch console sometime in its current fiscal year.
With another holiday season fast approaching, Japanese gaming giant Nintendo has taken to X with news of a new seasonal Switch offering. Like in previous years, the company has elected to bundle together new Switch units, as well as new Switch OLED units, each with a copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, plus a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online membership code.
Nintendo is no stranger to the annual holiday bundle tactic, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe remains a no-brainer pack-in game choice due to its near universal and cross-cultural appeal. The thing is, this current version of Mario Kart is something of a golden child within Nintendo’s pantheon of current-generation software releases.
Mario Kart 8 has legs
The game has been a monumental success for Nintendo
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was released early-on in the Switch’s life cycle, coming out on April 28, 2017. Since then, it has sold a remarkable 62.90 million units as of June 30, 2024. This places the game firmly within Nintendo’s ‘evergreen’ game title territory, meaning that it continues to fly off the shelves year-over-year.
What makes the sales volume of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe so jaw-dropping is that the title is not-so-secretly an enhanced port of a Wii U game released all the way back in 2014. The Wii U version, simply titled Mario Kart 8, managed to sell 8.46 million copies worldwide on the troubled console.
Put together with its Deluxe Switch counterpart, Mario Kart 8 has become one of the best-selling video games of all time. Mario Kart has always been a popular video game series with mass appeal, but it’s this 8th major console release that has blown previous sales records out of the water.
Rumors of a proper next-generation Mario Kart title for the Switch successor console are gaining traction.
Rumors of a proper next-generation Mario Kart title for the Switch successor console are gaining traction, and it’s very possible that the 2024 holiday season will be the last one to include the aging Mario Kart 8 Deluxe directly in the spotlight.
The successor to the Nintendo Switch is just over the horizon
The company plans to reveal its follow-up console within its current fiscal year
Nintendo/Pocket-Lint
It’s fair to say that the Switch series of gaming hardware has been a resounding success for Nintendo. There was a palpable sense of skepticism prior to the console’s launch in March 2017, which makes sense given the context of the company’s previous underwhelming Wii U market share.
Thankfully for the gaming giant, the Switch exploded onto the scene.
Thankfully for the gaming giant, the Switch exploded onto the scene. This reinvigorated the company’s profile, and bolstered the cultural relevance of its rich backlog of intellectual properties. The massive box office success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie is evidence enough that Nintendo is firmly back in the public limelight.
As of June 30, 2024, the Switch family of systems has sold a combined 143.42 million units. This puts Nintendo in spitting distance of dethroning the best-selling video game console of all time, which is the near 160-million-unit-selling Sony PlayStation 2.
After an impressive 8 years on the market and counting, Nintendo is finally ready to introduce a proper successor product.
After an impressive 8 years on the market and counting, Nintendo is finally ready to introduce a proper successor product. The company has stated that within the current fiscal year, it’ll unveil the Switch’s sequel console to the world.
The big N certainly has its work cut out for it, with no guarantee that a second-generation Nintendo Switch will penetrate the market in quite the same way as the original model. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will continue to serve as a major hardware sales pusher going into this year’s holiday season.
The big N certainly has its work cut out for it.
Nintendo’s new holiday bundles are expected to be available for purchase sometime in October, with a cost of $300 for the base Switch edition, and $350 for the higher-end Switch OLED variant. The Mario Kart 8 Deluxe pack-in title is being distributed via an included digital code, alongside the 12-months of Nintendo Switch Online.
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