This Mario Game Gets More Popular Every Year
Just like fine wine, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe gets better with age. As GamesIndusty.biz head Christopher Dring revealed this week, the Nintendo Switch port of the latest game in the long-running Mario Kart franchise has beaten its own sales records every year since its release in 2017.
Dring revealed in a Twitter thread this week that Mario Kart 8: Deluxe has sold more in 2020, according to U.K. box sales, than it did in 2019. "In fact, the game has sold better and better each and every year since it was released in 2017. Not bad for an upgraded port, eh?" Dring wrote. Dring is right that this is an impressive feat, considering the fact that the game originated on Nintendo's Wii U in 2014. As of September 30, 2020, Nintendo Switch's Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold 28.99 million units worldwide, while Wii U's Mario Kart 8 has sold only 8.45 million units.
As Game Rant pointed out, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's sales are also impressive given the fact that the sales record Dring referenced is only based on physical sales and not Nintendo's digital sales records, about which a Q2 financial summary revealed that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold 4.21 million units. Digital sales have been overtaking physical sales, but Mario Kart 8 Deluxe still fared very well in that department, despite COVID-19's impact on in-store browsing and product shipping in 2020.
The sales record comes just weeks after car performance company Redex published a study detailing the most popular Mario Kart games based on the number of average monthly Google searches made for each title. According to the data, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe came in first place with 33,100 searches, while Mario Kart 8 came in third with 12,100 searches. A survey of 2,000 people included in that study also named Mario and Peach as the most popular Mario Kart characters, by the way.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's record follows closely behind the Nintendo Switch's own broken record back in October. According to video game sales analyst Ryng, the "Switch was the best selling console in [the] USA for 22 consecutive months, since December 2018," surpassing the Xbox 360's record of being the best-selling console for 21 months from August 2011 to April 2013. Nintendo reminded everyone back in December 2019 that it had an awesome decade, and it looks like that success is going to continue.