Pokémon UNITE Ends Service on 23 March 2027 as Aeos Crown Registration Opens

The Pokémon Company has confirmed that Pokémon UNITE will end service on Tuesday 23 March 2027 at 00:00 UTC. The closure applies to both the Nintendo Switch and mobile versions of the strategic team battle game, which first launched on Switch on 21 July 2021.

Aeos gem sales were halted at 05:00 UTC on the day the shutdown notice was published. New UNITE Club memberships and automatic renewals stopped at the same time.

The Aeos Crown 2027 in Tokyo will still go ahead. The finals run on 20 and 21 March 2027, two days before the shutdown. Day one splits the field into eight round-robin groups, with the top two sides in each group moving to a single-elimination bracket on day two. Every match uses the “All-Star Draft” ruleset. There will be no general admission seating, and organisers plan to stream all matches live on official channels in several languages.

Registration for the regional qualifiers opened on the same morning as the closure news. The first online qualifiers start on 5 December. Teams in Europe, North America, Brazil, Latin America and Oceania can sign up until that date. Up to 32 teams will make the offline finals. North America and Japan hold four invitation slots each, while Europe, Brazil and Latin America North get three apiece. Japan’s quota includes ZETA DIVISION, the WCS 2026 winner. Two Last Chance Qualifiers, for APAC West and APAC East, offer one extra place each.

A farewell update arrives on 12 November. It adds special Unite coins, earned through log-in bonuses and match wins, which can be traded for items released earlier in the game’s life, such as Unite licences and Holowear. The same patch introduces a library mode that keeps certain records and cosmetics viewable after 23 March. Players must complete a data download before the shutdown to use it, and the publisher warns that library data generally cannot be moved between devices.

For the competitive community, the Tokyo finals close out more than five years of official UNITE play. The shutdown follows the publisher’s July confirmation that UNITE would be left out of the 2027 Pokémon World Championships and given a standalone tournament instead.