You can no longer buy Aliens: Fireteam Elite on Switch. In fact, even if you already bought it, you can’t reinstall it. The cloud version of the sci-fi shooter, including the $60 Ultimate Edition, has disappeared just three years after launching. It’s a fresh casualty of the Nintendo platform’s disappointing game-streaming gamble.
Switch players who had purchased the game were informed earlier this year that the game’s cloud servers would be shutting down on August 5, VGC reports. While Aliens: Fireteam Elite can be played offline with AI-controlled allies, this being a cloud version meant that once the game was shut down, it was unavailable for good, no matter how much you purchased it for.
“This is why I hate the push towards digital and cloud gaming,” one user wrote on the Switch subreddit. “Gonna see a lot of this sooner or later.” Another added, “What a sh*tty experiment cloud for Switch was.” Some also took shots at Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who recently suggested that cloud gaming would grow a lot over the next three years. “Almost like we aren’t just ‘dooming’ and this shit is for real,” wrote a third user.
Nintendo invited developers to opt for cloud versions of their games if it was otherwise impractical to port them to the underpowered Switch. This initiative saw games like The Medium and Hitman come to Switch via cloud versions, as well as several Resident Evil and Kingdom Hearts games. Developers are now able to port full native versions of those games to the more powerful Switch 2.
That’s prompted at last some to wonder if Aliens: Fireteam Elite, which has a sequel headed to Switch 2 this fall, will also be getting a native port at some point. And if it does, will people who owned the obsolete cloud version get it for free? While plenty of players have little sympathy for anyone who purchased a cloud game knowing it came with no promises, others can point to Google’s Stadia experiment, which still refunded people for their cloud purchases when the service abruptly shut down.