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This could have been the perfect opportunity to flip the mobile model. Screw it, charge $30 for the game and let it be a one time purchase, no micro transactions aside from content like new maps years from now, and no free version. People will still buy it because its mariokart, just like they buy the $60 version for their $300 switch, or how they buy skyrim 4x for each platform it gets rereleased on. These major dev…
Dr. Mario on the ancient gameboy still runs without issue. Sure, it's a bit dated... but the hardware and the software for it are static. A mobile Dr. Mario might only work until the next OS release. Spending $30 on something that may break in a few months is either going to be more costly to the company that created it (now having to do updates to it without any new revenue to support those updates) or brand damagin…
There's plenty of games where that happens on os and you see devs abandon them. Even still in gaming in general, gamers don't really expect long term support. Sometimes mulitplayer servers are shut down even when there is still a community using them. Some developers flat out say "we aren't patching this game anymore, its too old." Its the nature of the gaming market to keep buying the new game in the IP.