Mario Kart Tour ends on 29 September, and your rubies go with it

Mario Kart Tour has an end date. Nintendo's support notice puts it at 11:00 p.m. Pacific on 29 September 2026, after which the game for smart devices stops.

The closure itself was reported widely in July. What is worth reading now, with under seven weeks to go, is the shape of Nintendo's own notices — because they were not all published to tell you the same thing, and one of them concerns money you may still be holding.

The dates, as Nintendo states them

The tills closed on the same night as the notice

Nintendo's End-of-Service Notification does not stand alone. It points readers at two further articles covering, in its words, how rubies and Gold Passes are handled starting 7 July 2026 — and both of those describe something that had already happened by the time you could read about it.

The ruby article is blunt: sales of rubies ended at 11:00 p.m. Pacific on 7 July 2026. The Gold Pass article says all automatic subscription renewals and all new subscriptions stopped during the maintenance held at the same hour that night.

That ordering is the part worth internalising, because it is the normal one. A live-service game that has decided to close stops taking money at the moment it tells you, not weeks afterwards. If you ever find yourself reading a shutdown notice and wondering whether there is still time to buy something useful, the answer is almost always that the decision was made for you before you opened the page.

What your rubies can still do

Rubies already in your account are not frozen. Nintendo's notice states they can still be used in the Spotlight Shop, the Mii Racing Suit Shop and Coin Rush until service ends.

That is the whole list, and it comes with the same deadline as everything else. A balance you are saving for something is a balance that expires at 11:00 p.m. Pacific on 29 September, and there is nothing on Nintendo's end-of-service pages suggesting it converts into anything afterwards.

The Gold Pass is free now, and nobody has to claim it

This is the piece most likely to be missed, because it is a benefit rather than a warning. Nintendo has split it in two.

• If you were subscribed when maintenance began at 11:00 p.m. PT on 7 July 2026 — including anyone in a free-trial period — you keep Gold Pass benefits, minus continuous-subscription benefits, free, until 10:59 p.m. PT on 29 September 2026.
• If you were not subscribed at that moment — regardless of whether you had subscribed at some point in the past — you get the same benefits free from the start of the Vacation Tour at 11:00 p.m. PT on 4 August 2026, on the same end date.

Nintendo's FAQ is explicit that no extra steps are required to use them. It lists the benefits as Gold Gifts, Gold Challenges, 200cc, a doubled daily cap on base points and coins, a multiplayer pipe gauge that fills twice as fast, and a multiplayer grade cap of S+9. Continuous-subscription benefits are the exception, and are not available from 11:00 p.m. PT on 7 July 2026 onwards.

One practical note buried in the same FAQ: if you use the same save data, the benefits follow it across operating systems.

There is no offline version

Nintendo has published a one-line answer to the obvious question. Asked whether an offline version of Mario Kart Tour will be released, the FAQ says: "An offline version is not scheduled for release."

So this is a full closure rather than a conversion. Everything the game is stops working at the end date, including everything ever bought in it with real money.

What the notices do not say

Nintendo's end-of-service section is short. On 13 August 2026 it held four articles: the closure notice, the end of ruby sales, the Gold Pass arrangements, and the offline-version answer.

None of them mentions refunds. None describes what becomes of save data or of a linked Nintendo Account after the servers stop, and none says when — or whether — the app will be removed from the App Store and Google Play.

If you still have the game installed

1. 1

   Spend the rubies, or accept losing them

   The Spotlight Shop, the Mii Racing Suit Shop and Coin Rush are the three places Nintendo names. There is no fourth, and no extension has been announced.

2. 2

   Do not buy anything else

   You cannot buy rubies, and nothing bought now will outlive 29 September. That is the whole calculation.

3. 3

   Use the free Gold Pass

   It costs nothing, it needs no action to switch on, and it ends when the game does. If you stopped subscribing years ago, it is on for you as well.

4. 4

   Take your screenshots before the last week

   Whatever record you want of a collection built up over the years has to be made by you, on your device, while the servers still answer.

The wider pattern this fits — purchases disabled first, servers switched off later, and a refund question that rarely has a clean answer — is set out in what happens to your account when a mobile game shuts down. Mario Kart Tour is a close match for it, which is worth knowing before the next closure notice rather than after.

For the games still running, the habit that pays is reading what one intends to charge you for before you are invested: how to spot a pay-to-win mobile game before you install covers the signals visible on a store page.