Nintendo Shutting Down Mobile Game Dr. Mario World

Dr. Mario World, the mobile game Nintendo launched in 2019 with the help of LINE, will be shut down in November, the company just announced.

In a notice posted to Nintendo’s site, it says support for the game will end on November 1 at 6am UTC. For most games that means it just won’t be supported anymore, but in this case, being a mobile game reliant on external servers, it means the game will actually become entirely unplayable:

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.

You will be able to look back at your play history in Dr. Mario World Memories, which is a web page that will become available after the game’s service ends.

For the few still playing, Nintendo adds that “Furthermore, diamonds will no longer be available for purchase from July 28, 2024″, which is…today.

It’s weird how games can just disappear like this, even if the whole reason it’s being shut down is (likely) because nobody is playing it anymore. Like, a couple of weeks back my son wanted to play Minecraft Earth, something he’d been dabbling with pretty often, only to find that it too had been killed off in June, and now wasn’t even playable.

I tried to explain what had happened to the game to him and he just…didn’t understand how a game can be there, but not be there.