The Elder Scrolls: Legends, the free-to-play card game set in Bethesda’s fantasy world, has been removed from sale on Steam. Its servers will shut down for good on January 30th, 2025, after which it will no longer be playable. The closure comes five years after the game was last updated.
The game’s Steam page displays a message at the top that notes it is “no longer available on the Steam store.” An in-game message announces the closure.
“The Elder Scrolls: Legends servers will permanently shut down on January 30, 2025,” begins the message. “From now until January 30, 2025, all items in the store and entry into in-game events will be available for 1 gold each, so you can enjoy all the content Legends has to offer. On that date, servers will be shut down and the game will be inaccessible. Thank you for playing and we hope you have enjoyed your time in Legends.”
Brendy wrote in his Elder Scrolls Legends review that it “improved on Heathstone in an incremental way”, elevated by its rune system and held back by its Elder Scrolls setting. That was in 2017 and ongoing development on updates and expansions ceased just two years later.
Obviously Legends never found a huge, adoring audience, but as ever I find it infuriating that live service and free-to-play games are just a slip-and-slide of unpredictable length pointing straight into a bin. No offline mode, no chance of finding an audience in future, just: bin. It’s an awful way to treat your customers, and a terrible thing for video game culture in general that so much work is discarded so easily. Is any other medium so shortsighted?