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Mario Kart World is Japan's fastest selling game in the series ever

It has of course helped to bundle the game with Switch 2 units, where the popularity of both the consoles and the franchise has led to incredible sales numbers.
Jonas Mäki Editor Sweden 29 December 2025

Mario Kart 8 (including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) is Nintendo's second best-selling game of all time, after Wii Sports. Although Mario Kart World has not received quite the same warm reception, there is no doubt that it is a top game that has attracted hordes of buyers.

The strategy of bundling the game with a more expensive edition of Switch 2 has proven to be a stroke of genius, and it has now been revealed that this strategy has contributed to it becoming the fastest-selling Mario Kart game to date in Japan, reaching 2.5 million copies sold in just 29 weeks. The previous fastest-selling title in the series was Mario Kart Wii, which took 89 weeks in the country to reach the same milestone.

This also makes Mario Kart World, unsurprisingly, both Japan's fastest-selling Switch 2 game of 2025 and the best-selling game overall.

The fact that it is bundled has of course contributed to its success (just as it did for Wii Sports), but as we recently reported, it seems that Switch 2 bundles with Mario Kart World might disappear in a near future.

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Editor Sweden Jonas Mäki has written for Gamereactor since 2002, becoming an editor in 2007. He covers the video game industry across news, releases and the business side, with a particular interest in sales figures and where the industry is heading.
Full profile Gamereactor author since 2007 · 12,194 published articles
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