Every NINTENDO fan expected Mario and Sonic to make an Olympic appearance during the latest Nintendo Direct, but they were nowhere to be found.
In the last 16 years, there have been six Olympic games featuring Mario and Sonic, one each for the Summer Olympics in Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014.
After the latest Nintendo Direct, fans were left wondering where the Paris 2024 entry for the popular series was.
A new report from Eurogamershed light on the situation, including the new direction that video games tied to the Olympics are taking.
The site claims that a veteran of the Mario and Sonic franchise said that the International Olympic Committee decided to let the contract with Sega and Nintendo expire in 2020.
Fans assumed that the licensing agreement between the three companies had expired, but were unsure why the popular series had ended.
A former employee of sports marketing and digital media company ISM Ltd, responsible for managing the Olympic Games license with regards to video games, Lee Cocker, made comments claiming that the IOC wanted to take its tie-in games in a different direction.
Cocker states: “They wanted to look at other partners, NFTs and esports.
“Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [the gaming licence] turn to themselves internally and look to other partners to 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 partnership comes close to this concept.
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games have been replaced by a free-to-play mobile game, Olympics Go! Paris 2024, which is full of microtransactions.
It is well known that free games make more money than premium games thanks to continuous payments from players.
Olympics, go! is available via Android, iOS and the Epic Games Store, but the PC version is simply a version of the mobile app and not optimized for PC.
If you want to read more about Nintendo, check out the six-game pack that Shadow released on the Switch.
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This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
