Former Olympics marketer reveals controversial reason why Mario and Sonic aren’t returning to the games

NINTENDO fans were all expecting Mario and Sonic to make an Olympic appearance during the last Nintendo Direct, but they were nowhere to be found.

Over the past 16 years there have been six Olympic tie-in games featuring Mario and Sonic, one for the Summer Olympic games in Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, and the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014.

After the last Nintendo Direct, fans were left wondering where the Paris 2024 entry for the popular series was.

A new report by Eurogamer, has shed light on the situation including the new direction the Olympics tie-in video games are going.

The site claims a veteran of the Mario and Sonic franchise said that the International Olympics Committee decided to let the contract with Sega and Nintendo lapse in 2020.

Fans assumed that the licensing deal between the three companies had elapsed, but were unsure the reason why the popular series had ended.

A former employee of ISM Ltda sports marketing and digital media firm responsible for managing the Olympic Games licence with regards to video games, Lee Cocker, has made comments claiming that the IOC wanted to take its tie-in games in a different direction.

Cocker claims: “They wanted to look at other partners and NFTs and esports.

“Basically the IOC wanted to bring [the gaming licence] back to themselves internally and look at other partners so they would get more money.”

The statement is corroborated by the Olympics recent 12-year partnership with Saudi Arabia to host the Esports Olympic Games.

The IOC has not ventured into NFTs to date, however, its latest gaming tie-in moves closer to this concept.

Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games has been replaced by a free-to-play mobile game, Olympics Go! Paris 2024, which is filled with microtransactions.

It’s well known that free-to-play games make more money than premium games, thanks to ongoing payments by players.

Olympics Go! is available via Android, iOS and the Epic Games Store, but the PC version is simply a port of the mobile app and not optimised for PC.

If you want to read more about Nintendo, check out the six-game bundle that shadow dropped on Switch.