Players lose access to Aliens: Fireteam Elite on Nintendo Switch without refunds - arstechnica.com

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content).

Cold Iron Studios hasn’t offered customers refunds.

TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which is a 2021 co-op, third-person shooter based on the Alien film franchise. However, that would mean paying money for a game that you have already paid money for once.

Cold Iron Studios told customers in March that the game would shut down on August 5, Delisted Games reported at the time. In a pop-up message in the game, the publisher reportedly told players:

Thank you for playing our game. We sincerely appreciate your support. The game will be accessible until August 5, 2026, 23:59 JST. After that, you will no longer be able to access the game. We apologize to our loyal customers for any inconvenience this may cause, and we appreciate your understanding. We hope you will continue to enjoy our other game titles.

With the game delisted, people who paid for the game cannot play at all, including online with other players or alone offline.

Perhaps by no coincidence, the game’s shutdown comes weeks ahead of the release of the game’s sequel, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, on August 25. Killing the Switch version of the original could push some people to buy the sequel.

Cold Iron Studios hasn’t revealed Aliens: Fireteam Elite sales numbers on the Switch. The game is also available as a physical copy and for download on the PlayStation 5 and 4 and for download on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Those options likely deterred people from playing the game on the Switch, which was only available through the cloud. It’s possible that Cloud Iron Studios determined that killing the servers affects a limited number of people and that the game’s audience wasn’t large enough to sustain the costs of keeping the game running.

We’ve seen this happen to other games numerous times over the years on various platforms. People could one day lose digital downloads that they paid for, too, which is rare. But buying a digital copy only gets you a license to play the game, and this can be revoked if, for example, the store you bought it from loses the right to distribute the title.

When companies have erased digital copies from people’s libraries and made games harder to access in the past, the recent uproar over the announcement that there won’t be physical discs made for PlayStation games as of January 2028 makes sense.

Prior lawsuits over the shutdowns of already-purchased games have failed, bringing attention to the lack of true ownership that comes with digital purchases.

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