As you know, Nintendo is releasing 6 waves of DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in the Booster Course Pass. This DLC comes with 8 tracks per wave, as well as various extra characters, features and other content.

It’s an awesome deal for long time fans of the game, and one which has really kicked off interest in the game again as a result.

Yet recent events made us wonder something. Namely, could we be getting more DLC than we expected here?

Could a Booster Course Pass 2 be on the cards?

Because to be honest, we believe it’s highly likely. And there are quite a few reasons why, both relating to leaks and logistical purposes in general.

Let’s start with the latter…

Logistical Reasons for more DLC

Starting with the obvious one; Mario Kart Tour was way more courses than are being included in the first 6 waves.

Seriously, we know the first 32 tracks, and we know there are another 12 planned in waves 5 and 6. That gives us 48 courses total, which is a… somewhat sizable chunk of Tour’s content.

But it’s nowhere near all of it, and if Nintendo wants to preserve the game’s content for later generations… that’s a bit of a problem. For instance, we’ve got exactly one Super Mario Kart left in the DLC, at least if the prefix leaks are to believed:

Here is a showcase of all the cups with potential prefixes. We have not confirmed if it is grabbing this information from garbage data. pic.twitter.com/3yW46Ms1D5

— Fishguy6564 (@fishguy6564) March 17, 2022

With the total potentially going up to two or three if the unprefixed tracks from later are indeed retros rather than Tour originals.

Yet we’ve got 12 SNES tracks not in 8 Deluxe that are already in Tour, and more are likely on the way. So, any efforts Nintendo put into remastering these courses would seemingly be going to waste here.

And it gets crazier with the other games in the series. Mario Kart 64 has 3 more tracks in Tour that won’t make it into the Booster Course Pass, Super Circuit has 4, and the list just goes on and on. That’s a lot of tracks being given visual and level design overhauls going unused here, and an awful lot that Nintendo is seemingly willing to toss away until the next game in god knows how many years.

Heck, if we counted all the tracks in Tour that aren’t in 8 Deluxe at this point, we’d have another 2/3rds of a Booster Course Pass already, even without any extra city tracks, originals or remixed versions being thrown into the mix.

Add this to the datamined tracks that are likely coming to Tour (Dry Dry Ruins, Yoshi Desert, Moonview Highway, either Mushroom Bridge or Mushroom City, etc), and well, there are clearly more than enough retro tracks to fill out another 6 waves of DLC here.

There are also lots of city and original tracks on the line too. Like, at the moment, we know there are 5 city tracks planned for the DLC, and 4 possible slots for original ones. But we already have 2 cities that are certainly coming to the game, plus at least 1 totally original one that has to make it in (Piranha Plant Cove). So they’re cutting it fine with room for DLC content, especially if Tour is actually going to continue past the end of 2023.

Which is pretty likely all things considered. The game is doing well monetisation wise, and millions of people are playing it on a regular basis, with new features being added at a fairly consistent rate. So it feels like there’s a good chance it’ll continue past 2023, leaving us with numerous extra tracks and characters that Nintendo might very well want included in 8 Deluxe.

Leaked Reasons for More DLC

That brings us to the reasons based on the leaks we’ve seen online. With the most important being…

There’s no evidence that a new Mario Kart game is in development for the Switch 2/Switch Pro.

And given the sheer amount of rumours and pieces of evidence for such a console being released in 2024 or so, indicates that Nintendo isn’t willing to move on from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe just yet. No, in fact, with Nintendo Switch Online memberships carrying over to the next system and the eShop remaining the same (plus Nintendo’s huge amount of marketing for 8 Deluxe and the DLC in general), there’s a good possibility that 8 Deluxe is going to be the Switch 2’s Mario Kart game as well.

Heck, the DLC is basically Mario Kart 9 as it is, given how much is being added here. New tracks, new characters, major new features for things like items, changes to the core physics for both karts and items… Honestly, it seems likely that Nintendo’s just gonna stick their new stuff in the DLC pack and call it a day rather than having to build an entirely new game for their next system.

There’s also a leak relating to characters that might be coming to 8 Deluxe. Namely, this one by someone on 4chan who predicted both Birdo in wave 4 and tracks like DK Summit and DS Mario Circuit as coming soon:

Hmm, wonder how accurate this DLC Wave 4 leak is? Saw it on Reddit, and it's spooky how well it predicted the tracks…#MK8DX #MarioKart8Deluxe pic.twitter.com/gEjcPIeXOC

— Gaming Reinvented (@GamingReinvent) March 4, 2023

If this is correct, that’s a lot of characters to add in a couple of waves. Indeed, 14 characters in 3 waves implies 6 or 7 new characters in both waves 5 and 6.

And we just don’t see that happening at the current rate. Birdo is the only character being added to wave 4, so suddenly you expect them to chuck 7 more in wave 5? Feels more likely they’d spread them out over time, and release a couple each wave instead, especially given that we didn’t get any newcomers in the first 3 waves to date.

So if this leak is true (which is admittedly up in the air), it feels like it suggests more DLC waves will be necessary to fit everyone in.

There’s also that random suspicious change to the recent Booster Course Pass trailer too. Can you spot it:

No? Well, compare it to the last trailer here:

Note the change of wording. In the old trailer, it said

8 courses to be released at a time over 6 waves by the end of 2023.

Whereas in the new one it says:

Wave 1-6: 48 courses

Seems a lot more ambiguous now, doesn’t it? The original one indicated we were only getting 6 waves total and they’d be out by the end of 2023, whereas the new trailer just says how many courses are in waves 1-6, without any sign of an end date in sight.

Admittedly, this could mean a few things. It could mean the DLC has been delayed, and wave 6 can’t be released in 2023. And it could in theory mean a coincidence, given the other European versions of the trailer don’t have the changed wording…

But given the Japanese version of the trailer also has the new wording:

We’d bet that plans have changed on this front, and that another set of waves is at least on the table right now.

Either way, that’s why I believe we’ll be getting more Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC after the first Booster Course Pass finished. There are just way too many signs its happening, and too many leaks implying that more is on the way later.

But what do you think? Will another Booster Course Pass come to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe after the first one ends this year? What do you think the chances of a new Mario Kart game on the Switch Pro/Switch 2 are?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below, on social media, or on our Discord server today!