When a free-to-play game shuts down its servers, players lose cosmetics and time; however, when a game with an upfront purchase becomes completely unplayable, we get a stark reminder that we don’t own what we buy. With the Stop Killing Games movement struggling and Sony ending physical releases, a future of digital licensing fragility awaits us, where $59.99 doesn’t even buy a game, let alone security.
Famously, Concord‘s immediate destruction led to automatic refunds for every player who jumped on board, something that needed to be done considering it lasted two weeks. However, most games last longer than that and do not offer refunds for their buyers, leaving them with a glorified cupholder that serves as a source of memories and frustration.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite Shuts Down Switch Cloud Version
$29.99 or $59.99 That You Will Never Get Back
Well, we might as well start with the inspiration for this article. Earlier this month, Aliens: Fireteam Elite shut down its Switch Cloud Version, making the game entirely unplayable on the system. It doesn’t matter if you purchased the $29.99 standard edition or the $59.99 ultimate release; you are left with exactly nothing.
To be honest, many predicted that this would be the fate of these types of Switch releases, and while Aliens: Fireteam Elite was the first, it will not be the last. Square Enix has already set a shutdown date of June 9, 2027, for the Kingdom Hearts Cloud Collection, which can no longer be purchased. The dominoes have begun to fall, and there ain’t no stopping them now.
Unlike other games that rely on multiplayer or online functionality, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is technically a standard offline game… on every system besides the Switch. Co-op aside, a standard single-player linear shooter shouldn’t come with such risks.
Babylon’s Fall Was An Expensive Mistake For Everyone
$59.99 Flushed Down The Drain
A combo of Square Enix and PlatinumGames should produce only excellence, and we got that with Nier: Automata. However, throw “live-service” into the mix, and quality goes out the window as both companies stumble blindly in pursuit of a genre and business model they know nothing about. Babylon’s Fall cost $59.99 and promised to be a premium hack-and-slash action RPG, only to provide an experience that wasn’t even worth a free-to-play download.
We have seen live-service games flop at launch, only to recover through consistent updates, but Babylon’s Fall was such a colossal failure that any hope of a turnaround never materialized. Everyone involved, including players, knew that they had made a big mistake that was beyond repairing.
Ubisoft Kills The Crew And Births A Movement
$59.99 Amounts To Only Memories And Righteous Indignation
- Ubisoft shut down the servers on March 31, 2024, despite outcry from the community for an offline version.
Perhaps the most well-known example of a full-priced game that shut down its servers to widespread criticism, The Crew should never have had always-online DRM. Yes, multiplayer was a big part of the experience, but it was ultimately an open-world racer that had plenty of single-player content that would have been perfectly fine offline if it didn’t need to constantly check in with Ubisoft’s authentication servers.
After The Crew became unplayable, Ubisoft started to revoke digital licenses from accounts, hampering the effort to create a community-led offline server. You could no longer access or download the game’s files, essentially deleting everything from your account. This whole mess was such a watershed moment for digital games preservation that it sparked the onset of the Stop Killing Games movement.
LawBreakers Walked Into The Sunset With Your Money
$29.99 Barely Lasted A Year
- Full release on August 8, 2017. Dead on September 14, 2018.
Despite being attached to big names and featuring pretty solid gameplay, LawBreakers was nearly dead on arrival, consumed by the rippling tide of Overwatch. Boss Key Productions pitched the game as a skill-based 5v5 hero shooter that emphasized mobility and zero gravity, all the while avoiding microtransactions by sticking to a $29.99 price tag.
On Steam, LawBreakers was pulling less than 100 players by December 2017, and it didn’t pick up until the next June, when the game became free-to-play following the announcement of its impending closure. That same announcement also stated, “we will not be able to accept any refund requests.”
I’d say the game lived up to its title, but it’s apparently not against the law.
Battleborn Is A Cautionary Tale
$59.99 Up In Smoke
- Servers shut down on January 31, 2021, less than 5 years after its launch. Goodbye to everything.
Another Overwatch victim, Battleborn confidently went up against Blizzard’s behemoth, only to quickly realize that David doesn’t always topple Goliath (not that Gearbox and 2K are underdogs). Now, to be fair, Overwatch could fit this article as well, as Blizzard eventually shut down the paid original game; however, Battleborn feels worse because it actually shipped with a solo PvE story campaign.
As every single mode needed to go through mandatory online server authentication, even the solo content that was essentially an offline mode couldn’t be kept alive after the multiplayer portion was put out of its misery. Could a patch have added offline support to preserve this content and avoid turning copies of the game into waste? I don’t know, but nowadays it feels like Battleborn never existed.
