The Nintendo Switch version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite is now completely removed from sale and impossible to play for people who bought it.
Developer Cold Iron Studios announced earlier this year that Fireteam Elite, a game that runs in the cloud and not locally, would be shut down on August 5, and now that day has come. The game was delisted on the Switch’s eShop earlier this year, along with other digital platforms.
However, the game remains playable on other platforms in an offline state. Because the Switch version is streamed over the cloud, it’s now totally unplayable.
Fireteam Elite originally launched in August 2021 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, before coming to Switch in April 2013 via the cloud. A sequel, Fireteam Elite 2, is coming this August on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, with the Switch 2 edition arriving later in the year.
These kinds of issues, along with physical media going away, has prompted anger and frustration from fans, along with concerns about game preservation.
Cloud gaming has been around for years, in various stages, and Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick recently said he expects adoption to continue to grow. During an earnings call recently, Zelnick said he believes the industry will be in “commercial streaming mode” within three years. He and others have theorized that expanded access to cloud gaming could help bring in more revenue by way of reaching more people.
With console prices continuing to go up, people might see cloud gaming as an increasingly attractive opportunity to play the latest games without needing to own expensive hardware. For this to work, though, there needs to be low latency, Zelnick said. People would also need steady and reliable connections, along with internet plans with generous data caps, or no caps at all.
The road to cloud gaming has been paved with plenty of issues. Google’s Stadia service previously shut down and the cloud versions of Kingdom Hearts games, like Fireteam Elite for Switch, will be shut down in the future. These are issues that could engender mistrust with the entire concept of cloud gaming.
In 2019, Zelnick said clouding gaming was not going to revolutionize the gaming industry, nor did he buy into the theory that cloud streaming would open up a whole new market of people who previously didn’t play games.