Nintendo’s Dr Mario World will shut down in November
The mobile puzzler will be unplayable after its closure, even in single-player mode
Nintendo has announced that mobile puzzler Dr Mario World will shut down in around three months.
An ‘End of Service Notice’ posted on the mobile game’s website states: “Thank you for playing the Dr Mario World game. The Dr Mario World game’s service will end on November 1, 2021.”
Players will no longer be able to buy diamonds (the in-game currency) from today.
According to the announcement: “If you start up the Dr. Mario World game after the game’s service has ended, an end-of-service notification will be displayed and you will not be able to play the game.”
A website called Dr Mario Memories will be launching after the game ends, which will let players look back at their play history.
Dr Mario World launched in July 2019 and enjoyed a solid launch with more than 2 million downloads in its first three days, generating around $100,000 in revenue.
Despite this, these figures failed to match the company’s previous performance on smartphones: Super Mario Run achieved 4.3 million downloads in the same period despite being iOS-only at launch, while Fire Emblem Heroes managed 4.9 million and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp hit 6 million.
The free-to-play “action puzzle” title, which is supported by microtransactions, tasks players with matching capsules with viruses to make them disappear.
It has a single-player Stage mode and a multiplayer Versus mode. Stage mode is structured similarly to games like Candy Crush Saga, where players have to eliminate all the viruses in a single level.
Versus mode, meanwhile, pits players against each other with the ability to unlock a variety of different doctor characters, each with their own special moves.
