I was just watching a video on YouTube of a guy predicting what he thinks the remaining DLC tracks for 8 Deluxe will be. I have also made my own predictions list so I can see what I got right and wrong when they are eventually revealed bit by bit. But it got me thinking though.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was an enhanced and spruced up port of the Wii U game (which did not do well on that system at all) which came out for the Switch in April of 2017. Mario Kart Tour launched for mobile devices in September of 2019 and that game has many tracks in it that are remastered versions of older tracks in the series, alongside it's "Tour" themed tracks, some of which are already in the 8 Deluxe DLC like Paris Promenade and Tokyo Blur.

Nobody, not even Nintendo could have predicted how INSANELY SUCCESSFUL 8 Deluxe would be. It has sold more than 50 million units now, meaning that roughly 1 in 2 Switch owners has 8 Deluxe. That is just insanity.

My conspiracy theory is that when Nintendo saw how insanely well 8 Deluxe was selling and that there was no sign of it slowing down anytime soon (and there still isn't), they looked at that and said fuck it. Let's delay Mario Kart 9/10 or whatever it's gonna be called for a while but keep working on it lightly in the background, take all the existing tracks from the older games that we remastered in Tour, spruce them up just a little bit more to make them fit on and look good on the Switch and literally double the amount of tracks in 8 Deluxe which has a HUGE install base by selling them for literally 50c each in a massive DLC collection and even make it free for the people who bought the NSO Expansion Pack and make the NSO Expansion Pack look like even better value for money for people who hadn't bought it yet. People have been begging us for more content in that game, they will buy it no matter what because of the nostalgia of the old tracks.

And while we're at it, let's only release a handful of them at a time, months apart from each other and let's let people spend the next 2 years speculating and discussing on what they think the new tracks will be, keeping the game fresh in peoples minds, keeping the conversation going and making Mario Kart the new Smash Brothers model where an announcement of new tracks will be just as big and exciting as a new Smash Bros character and when we reveal Waluigi Pinball, Twitter will crash, just like it did for Minecraft Steve.

It the least amount of work for the most amount of money. It makes perfect sense.

Let me be very clear, I 100% think that Mario Kart 9/10 (if you count Tour as 9) is being worked on, but it will not be coming out for a good long while yet and probably not even until Nintendo's next console most likely. I am also not stating this theory as FACT. It is just a random theory that popped into my head. Honestly, if I were the CEO or president of Nintendo and I saw how insanely well this game was doing, I would do the exact same thing because EVERYONE LOVES MONEY!

My only desire is that I hope that they quietly release a patch/update to fix a few of the nagging little things that would make the game even better. For example, change the Battle Mode settings so that you can turn the timer and NPC's off for people who just wanna do a battle to the death with their friends, no matter how long it takes, like the good old days on 64 and GameCube. Also, make it so you can switch your two items in a race by hitting up on the D-Pad, like how you switch characters in Double Dash.

I think that this is a very solid theory, but I wanna hear your thoughts. Please let me know in the comments.