You have eight people crammed around a TV, each staring at a viewport roughly the size of a Post-it note, blue shells detonating everywhere. That’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe now. A free Switch 2 update — Ver. 4.0.0, September 2026 — unlocks 8-player local split-screen, a franchise first. Higher-resolution visuals and faster load times come along for the ride. The uncomfortable punchline: Nintendo just made its 12-year-old game a harder buy against its own $80 flagship.
Eight Players, One Screen, One Catch
Eight-player split-screen is nearly extinct on modern consoles — and Nintendo just resurrected it.
Eight-player local play on a single console is, as TechSpot put it, “virtually unthinkable” in modern gaming. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Virtua Racing on Switch — currently on sale for roughly $2.40 — are the rare exceptions. Mario Kart 8 just joined that very short list. The likely trade-off is 30 fps in 8-player mode, but Switch 2’s higher-resolution output keeps those tiny viewports readable.
Worth noting: CameraPlay (USB-C camera, sold separately) lets your face appear on screen during races — but only for 2–4 players per session. Half your friends race faceless into the void.
Key details from the update:
- 8-player local split-screen, free, Switch 2 only
- Higher-resolution visuals and faster pre-race load times
- CameraPlay support capped at 2–4 players, even in 8-player sessions
- Hitting 8 players requires at least one Joy-Con 2 or Switch 2 Pro Controller alongside up to seven original Switch controllers
- Pikmin 3 also received a free resolution boost — part of a broader Nintendo back-catalog refresh pattern
“Multiplayer on the same console with more than four players, much less via split-screen, has always been virtually unthinkable.” — TechSpot
Eighty million copies sold across 12 years explains why Nintendo keeps investing in this title. Mario Kart 8 costs roughly $20 less than its successor on Switch 2 and now holds a local multiplayer mode the newer game simply cannot match.
The Mario Kart World Problem
When your older game undercuts your new one, someone made a strange call.
Mario Kart World has sold 15 million units at an $80 MSRP — genuinely impressive for a launch window title. With no announced DLC or major post-launch content yet, however, it sits next to a cheaper competitor that Nintendo itself just turbocharged with an exclusive feature. For families and cost-conscious buyers, the rational pick is suddenly the older video games.
That’s a genuinely odd position for any publisher to engineer around its own flagship title.
If you’re weighing the Switch 2 purchase, this update sharpens the calculus and raises a fair question: if 8-player split-screen proves as chaotic and beloved as it sounds, the pressure lands squarely on Mario Kart World to eventually answer it.
