The Nintendo Switch version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite has been removed from sale and no longer works for the people who bought it, GameSpot reports. Developer Cold Iron Studios announced earlier this year that the Switch release would shut down on August 5, and that date has now passed.
The distinction that matters is how the Switch edition ran. Rather than running locally on the console, it streamed from the cloud, so switching off the servers removed the only way to play it. The game had already been delisted from the Switch eShop earlier this year, along with other digital storefronts.
On the platforms where Aliens: Fireteam Elite runs locally, the situation is different. The game originally launched in August 2021 on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, and it remains playable there in an offline state. Only Switch owners have been left with nothing to launch.
A sequel, Fireteam Elite 2, is due this month on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, with a Switch 2 edition arriving later in the year.
The shutdown has fed into a wider argument about preservation, arriving as physical media continues to recede. Cloud versions of other games face the same fate, including the cloud releases of the Kingdom Hearts titles, and Google's Stadia service shut down entirely several years ago.
Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick, speaking on a recent earnings call, said he expects adoption of cloud gaming to keep growing and believes the industry will be in what he called commercial streaming mode within three years. He and others have argued that broader cloud access could raise revenue by reaching people who do not want to buy increasingly expensive hardware. Zelnick attached conditions: the model needs low latency, steady and reliable connections, and internet plans with generous data caps or none at all. In 2019 he took the opposite view publicly, saying cloud gaming would not revolutionise the industry or open up a new market of people who did not already play games.
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