Key Takeaways
- The Elder Scrolls: Legends is shutting down on January 30, 2025, with no offline play available after this date.
- Facing stiff competition, the game failed to find a large audience and saw a decline in player count over time.
- Bethesda has not made an official statement, but the game’s closure was confirmed with players greeted by a message about the shutdown.
The Elder Scrolls: Legends has confirmed that it is shutting down on January 30, 2025, removing players’ ability to play the digital card game for good. While The Elder Scrolls: Legends has already been delisted from Steam, players who have the game on PC and mobile can continue to play the game until this date.
The Elder Scrolls: Legends was first released back in 2017, when it faced ample competition in the digital card game genre. Other titles such as Hearthstone have something of a stranglehold on the genre, and The Elder Scrolls: Legends largely failed to find an audience despite its connection to Bethesda’s wildly popular RPG franchise. The game’s Steam population peaked at almost 9,000 players back in 2017, although this quickly cratered. By 2020, its Steam player count had fallen into the hundreds and never recovered, in part due to The Elder Scrolls: Legends being put on hold in late 2019. It has had no updates since.
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Although Bethesda has yet to release any statement on its social media channels or website, as reported by PCGamesN, players launching The Elder Scrolls: Legends are now greeted with a message confirming the game’s imminent closure. “The Elder Scrolls Legends servers will permanently shut down on January 30, 2025,” the message confirms, also revealing that “all items in the store and entry into in-game events will be available for one gold each, so you can enjoy all the content Legends has to offer.” As the final nail in the coffin, “the game will be inaccessible” after this date, so there’s no offline play. It’s unfortunate that the game never fulfilled its potential to become one of the most popular card games on the market.
Sadly, The Elder Scrolls: Legends has already been delisted from Steam, too, meaning it won’t be able to bring in any new players as it hurtles towards closure. Although the game’s remaining audience was small, it did exist. It’s certainly a shame for those who continue to play the game that they won’t be able to access it in any offline capacity. There are live-service games being shut down after just one year nowadays, so while it’s good that The Elder Scrolls: Legends at least got seven years online, the game will certainly become part of the ongoing conversation surrounding the preservation of these kinds of titles.
While The Elder Scrolls: Legends might be going away, the franchise as a whole is ramping up to enter an entirely new era. With Starfield now released, Bethesda is working on the development of The Elder Scrolls 6, although a release date for the long-awaited title has not yet been confirmed. Earlier this year, a Bethesda developer accidentally hinted at The Elder Scrolls 6‘s setting, which was gamers’ first real hint of where the upcoming title will take place. It’s an exciting time to be a fan of the franchise.
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