Free Elder Scrolls Is Getting Shut Down Later This Year

Bethesda will be shutting down a free Elder Scrolls game later this year, giving you one last chance to play it before the servers close.

As announced by Bethesda earlier this week, the servers for The Elder Scrolls: Blades will shut down on 30 June, 2026, giving you around three months to continue playing the game.

The Elder Scrolls: Blades has already been delisted from mobile and Nintendo Switch storefronts, and all items in the in-game store have been reduced to 1 Gem or Sigil each.

All players have also been awarded a free bundle of Gems and Sigils, effectively allowing them to experience all the content in the game before its planned shutdown in June.

Gems and Sigils are the premium currency in The Elder Scrolls: Blades, with items previously being sold for several hundred or thousand Gems each.

The Elder Scrolls: Blades Was A Big Success For Bethesda At Launch

While not as popular as the mainline games in the series—or other mobile games that Bethesda has released like Fallout: Shelter—The Elder Scrolls: Blades found some initial commercial success when it was first released into early access in 2019.

In its first week of release, it gained one million downloads on iOS, making around $500,000 in revenue. Within the first month, that number had exceeded $1.5 million on iOS, making around $50,000 per day.

As time went on, the game gradually dropped off in popularity, as many mobile games seem to do. Sensor Tower estimated that Blades only makes around $20,000 per month now. Not nothing, but it’s perhaps eating too many costs for Bethesda to keep online any longer.

Bethesda Softworks

The Elder Scrolls: Blades is essentially a first-person Elder Scrolls game built for mobile phones. There are three main game modes: Abyss, Arena, and Town.

Abyss is the game’s roguelike dungeon crawl mode, where you’re tasked with defeating enemies and finding loot in an endless dungeon.

Meanwhile, Arena is Blades’ player-versus-player mode, where you can enter into combat against other real players to reap new rewards.

Finally, Town is more of a social hub. It’s where players can spend their hard-earned currency, speak to NPCs, receive quests, and progress the story.

Following the success of the game on mobile, The Elder Scrolls: Blades came to Nintendo Switch in 2020. If you’ve still got the game downloaded, you have until 30 June to finish off anything you were doing in it.

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