As many have noted, Paris 2024 is the first Olympic Games since Beijing 2008 to not get a Mario & Sonic title. This sports series has been a mainstay since the first release in 2007, spawning three mainline sequels, as well as two tie-ins for the Winter Games.
However, it looks like skipping the Paris games will not be a one-off. According to one of the former developers, the Mario & Sonic Olympic Games series is gone for good, as the licence is now in the hands of another studio.
This comes from Lee Cocker, who addressed the absence of another Mario & Sonic game over on Twitter. According to his LinkedIn, Cocker worked as part of the team that assisted the Mario & Sonic devs with making an Olympics-themed game, so he would have a good deal of insight into the future of the series - or lack thereof.
In a follow-up, Cocker says the licence to make Olympics-related tie-in games is now with the studio nWay Games. This studio describes itself as a "pioneer" of free-to-play and Web3 games, so quite different from what we were getting when Sega was at the helm for all those years....
