Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Bethesda is shutting down The Elder Scrolls: Blades on June 30

read original more articles
Why This Matters

Bethesda's decision to shut down The Elder Scrolls: Blades servers marks the end of a six-year chapter for a game that struggled to maintain its player base and critical acclaim. This move highlights the challenges faced by mobile game developers in sustaining long-term engagement and profitability, especially for titles with microtransaction-heavy models. For consumers, it underscores the importance of understanding game longevity and the potential for games to be discontinued, impacting their investment and gameplay experience.

Key Takeaways

It's a sad day for the dozens of players still grinding The Elder Scrolls: Blades. Bethesda announced that it's permanently shutting down the servers for its free-to-play mobile spinoff on June 30. First spotted on Reddit, The Elder Scrolls: Blades has already been delisted from the App Store and Google Play store, and is currently unavailable on the Nintendo Store.

In the meantime, players will receive a free bundle of Gems and Sigils, while all items in the in-game store are available for just one Gem or Sigil each. With a server shutdown imminent, The Elder Scrolls: Blades' will at least cross its six-year mark since its official release was in 2020 for Android, iOS and Nintendo Switch. The dungeon-crawling spinoff did see early success when more than one million iOS users downloaded the game during the first week of its early access period, but it never amounted to the commercial success of Bethesda's mainline titles.

In the end, The Elder Scrolls: Blades ended up with a "Generally Unfavorable" score on Metacritic, with critics calling it "repetitive" and filled with microtransactions. The shutdown doesn't come as a total surprise, since Bethesda also killed off its other spinoff, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, by halting development in 2019 and ultimately taking the game's servers offline in January 2025. For anyone who still wants to play a mobile spinoff of Bethesda's fantasy world, there's still The Elder Scrolls: Castles.