Elder Scrolls: Legends has been removed from sale and will be unplayable in January 2025

The Elder Scrolls: Legendsthe free-to-play card game set in the fantasy world of Bethesda has been withdrawn from sale on Steam. The servers will be permanently shut down on January 30, 2025, after which it will no longer be playable. The closure comes five years after the game was last updated.

The game Steam page displays a message at the top stating that it is “no longer available on the Steam Store.” An in-game message announces the closure.

“The Elder Scrolls: Legends servers will be permanently shut down on January 30, 2025,” the message begins. “From now until January 30, 2025, all items in the store and access to in-game events will be available for 1 gold each, so you can enjoy all the content Legends has to offer. On that date, the servers will be closed and the game will not be accessible. Thanks for playing and we hope you enjoyed your time in Legends.”

Brendy wrote in his Elder Scrolls Legends review that it “improved in an incremental way on Heathstone”, elevated by its rune system and held back by its Elder Scrolls setting. That was in 2017 and the continuous development of updates and expansions stopped just two years later.

Obviously Legends never found a huge, adoring audience, but as always I find it infuriating that live service and free-to-play games are just a slip-and-slide of unpredictable length that points straight into a trash can. No offline mode, no chance of finding an audience in the future, just bin. It’s a terrible way to treat your customers, and a terrible thing for video game culture in general that so much work is so easily thrown away. Is there any other medium that is so short-sighted?