Mario Kart World reportedly had a much bigger development team than Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, with the transition to Nintendo Switch 2 and a new open world probably driving the beefier (cows, unrelated) dev count.
A new report from games industry analyst Papen (good spot, Automaton) digs into the numbers behind the best Nintendo Switch 2 game so far and how it compares to the series' last entry more than a decade ago.
By Papen's count, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had around 163 full-time developers - 18 involved in game design, 72 involved with programming, and 73 people on the art team. By comparison, Mario Kart World almost doubled the total dev count and nearly tripled its predecessor's art department, as there were 22 game designers, 86 programmers, and 192 artists on the racing game sequel.
Of course, it's probably worth noting that those numbers don't account for QA testers, people involved with the game's mega-soundtrack, localization workers, and other outsourced talent, but we can guess Mario Kart World's team is likely bigger than MK8's by any metric.
The jump in Mario Kart World's art team specifically is probably the result of its huge, interconnected, free-roaming map - there's simply more ground to cover this time around, so it makes sense that Nintendo needed more artists to fill it all out.
We already knew that Nintendo already employed the help of Xenoblade Chronicles studio Monolith Soft, which also contributed to the company's other open-world Zelda games, but the report mentions that external developers like Imagica Geeq, 1-Up Studio, and Bandai Namco were also involved.
Either way, the bigger production more than paid off for Nintendo. Mario Kart World is currently outselling The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild four times over in Japan, and in the US, the launch game propelled the Switch 2 past PS4's previous sales records.
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