Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is now the best-selling Mario Kart game ever

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has become the best-selling entry in the series.

In a new earnings report, Nintendo announced that in the past six months it sold 3.34 million copies of the game, pushing lifetime sales to 38.74 million. That pushes the game around 360,000 copies ahead of Mario Kart Wii, lifetime sales of which sit a little under 37.4 million.

That boost in sales - particularly impressive for a 4.5 year old enhanced edition of a game that originally released for the Wii U in 2014 - keeps Mario Kart 8 Deluxe ahead of Animal Crossing: New Horizons as the best-selling Nintendo Switch game by slightly less than four million copies. It's worth pointing out that the game has had a lot longer to amass sales than Tom Nook and friends' most recent outing, but also that its standard version sold an additional 8.5 million copies on Wii U.

The jump also pushes Mario Kart 8 Deluxe an extra step up Nintendo's all-time best-sellers list. It's unlikely to ever challenge all-timer Wii Sports' 83 million copies, but it sits not too far behind Super Mario Bros' 40 million NES copies, and within sight of Pokemon's first generation, which includes the combined sales of Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow for a total of 47 million copies, which means there's an argument for calling the Deluxe edition the third best-selling Nintendo game of all time.

Continued high sales, especially this long after release, might mean that Nintendo isn't exactly rushing to make Mario Kart 9, which is the only downside to this news, but the series' ongoing success means it's likely to be on the company's mind, somewhere down the line.

Unsurprisingly, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe finds its way onto our list of the best Switch games.