Bethesda is shutting down a game it had already forgotten about

digitaltrends.com:

Bethesda might be one of the most beloved developers out there, but the studio has a series problem with long-term support for its games (except Skyrim. It gives all its support to Skyrim.) Now the company is shutting down The Elder Scrolls: Legends, its collectible trading card game that was originally set to be a Hearthstone killer.

Of course, this news doesn’t come as a huge surprise to fans. Legends hasn’t received an update since 2019 — only two years after its launch — and the player count has steadily dwindled. Bethesda did make some improvements to the game after it released, but it wasn’t enough to revive the game in a marketplace that included Hearthstone, Gwent, Slay the Spire, and other un-put-downable titles.

You can no longer obtain The Elder Scrolls: Legends from Steam, and if you have the game installed and boot it up, you’ll see a message saying the servers will be permanently shuttered on January 30, 2025. That said, there is one slight upside: the cost of all in-game items and events has been reduced to just a single gold each so the remaining players can fully experience everything the title has to offer.

Players are, unsurprisngly, disappointed. Though the game did not have a large fan base, it had a loyal one. And many players are unhappy about losing access to a game they’ve spent real money on. Even if someone (likely) starts a private server to keep the game going, in-app purchases will be lost forever.

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Legends is far from the first game to be closed down when there was still a fanbase, and it won’t be the last. It’s the inevitable result of the way rights are set up, though — as Steam made abundantly clear to all its players, you don’t actually own any games on the platform.