William Gallagher
Nintendo has announced an "end of service" for the iOS game "Dr. Mario World," and has already ceased in-app purchases.
Just over two years since its launch on the App Store, "Dr. Mario World," Nintendo is shutting down the Tetris-inspired game that originally debuted on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. From Monday, November 1, 2021, the game will cease to be available — and existing users will no longer be able to play.
"We would like to extend our sincere thanks to everyone who has played the game," said Nintendo in a statement. "The Dr. Mario World game's service will end on November 1, 2021 (Mon). Furthermore, diamonds will no longer be available for purchase from July 28, 2021 (Wed)."
The company has not given a reason for ending the game, but it has confirmed that it will cease working for existing users.
"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," the company says. "You will be able to look back at your player history in Dr. Mario World Memories, which is a web page that will become available after the game's service ends."
Reportedly "a portion" of users' player history will be saved and "referenced in Dr. Mario World Memories." Users who don't want their history preserved can delete the save data in the app.
"Dr. Mario World" is Nintendo's second casualty on iOS. The first was Miitomo which ran for two years between 2016 and 2018.
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13 Comments
This is really a shame. I saw the notice this morning when I opened the game to play a few levels. Dr. Mario was always one of my favorite games going all the way back to the NES. I used to play the original with my brother every day as a kid. I even purchased Dr. Mario as a downloadable game for the Wii back when that was a thing. I liked this version too, though I didn't like how pushy Nintendo was with the in-App purchases, but many, many games on the App store have a similar model. I was able to always advance and enjoy playing with out spending any money, but a flat purchase price like they did for Super Mario Run would have been better to me personally. I would have gladly ponied up $10 and them maybe 99 cents for each new world after the first 5 or 10 (currently 31).
This is a bummer. Too bad they can’t enable the current levels to work for a long time in the future.
It stinks that an app can be made non-functional by the developer, even though network connectivity is not actually used in the app, and especially when users have put money into the app. I love Nintendo, but their entire approach to mobile is garbage.
The lesson here is don't invest in any in-app purchases for Nintendo games on iOS. That's a nice tidy profit they made, and now the purchasers are left with no way to enjoy what they've paid for.