The Pokémon Company has confirmed that Pokémon UNITE will end service on Tuesday 23 March 2027 at 00:00 UTC, and the title’s last official competition, the Aeos Crown 2027 in Tokyo, is set to wrap up just two days earlier.
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 today. New UNITE Club memberships and automatic renewals were stopped at the same time, according to the official end of service notice.
Aeos Crown 2027 still goes ahead
The shutdown does not affect the Tokyo event, which the publisher says will take place as previously announced. Back in July, it confirmed that UNITE would be left out of the 2027 Pokémon World Championships and handed a standalone tournament instead.
Registration for the regional qualifiers opened on the same morning as the closure news. Under the qualifier schedule on Pokemon.com, 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, who won the WCS 2026 title. Two Last Chance Qualifiers, for APAC West and APAC East, offer one extra place each.
Format and broadcast plans
The finals run on 20 and 21 March 2027. Day one splits the field into eight round-robin groups, and the top two sides in each group progress to a single-elimination bracket on day two. Every match uses the “All-Star Draft” ruleset.
There will be no general admission seating in Tokyo. Instead, the organisers plan to stream all matches live on official channels in several languages, with full regulations hosted on each regional registration site.
What players keep after the servers close
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 one-off 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 now close out more than five years of official UNITE play. It is another shift for organised Pokémon events, following the North American International Championships’ move to Chicago for 2027.
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