Nintendo filed its annual securities report recently, and buried in the dry financial language is a stat that says everything about who Nintendo actually is: nearly all of the company's revenue comes from what it calls "dedicated video game platforms." Consoles, handhelds, first-party software. Not phones, not streaming, not whatever the trendy diversification play of the quarter happens to be. As a breakdown over on Note points out, Nintendo remains almost entirely a video game company, and it seems perfectly happy about that.

The number that really got me, though, is the software side. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a game that launched in 2017, is still selling millions of copies a year. Nine years later. No battle pass, no seasonal content treadmill, no FOMO machine grinding away in the background. It's a kart racer that keeps selling because new Switch owners keep arriving and everyone tells them the same thing: you need Mario Kart.

Compare that to the live-service world I spend most of my time in. I've watched MMOs and hero shooters bend themselves into pretzels trying to hold player numbers for six months, and Nintendo has a nine-year-old game quietly moving millions of units a year alongside entire annual franchises. Stardew Valley is the closest comparison in spirit, and I said as much last week when the arcade machine update landed: ConcernedApe's decade of free updates is the quiet counterargument to the battle pass model. Nintendo's version of that argument is simpler. Make something that plays great in year one and year nine, and it keeps selling.

That kind of concentration cuts both ways, of course. When a console cycle softens, there's nowhere to hide. We saw it during the Wii U era, and the Switch 2 transition is exactly the moment you'd want a side business cushioning things. Whatever lives in that remaining sliver of revenue, other businesses, licensing, the stuff outside the dedicated platform bucket, is a sliver. Nintendo knows the dependency. It's just decided that making the best dedicated gaming hardware and software on the planet is the whole job.

And the Mario Kart number is a community story as much as a sales story. Every one of those millions of annual copies is someone joining a game their friends have been playing for nearly a decade. It reminds me of a friend finally buying FFXIV six expansions in and finding the whole server waiting for them. Long-tail games work because people are the content.

So the next time someone tells you single-purchase games are dead and everything has to be a service now, remember that a nine-year-old kart racer is outselling most new releases without trying. Nintendo built an evergreen, and evergreens don't need hype windows.