Bethesda has announced it The Elder Scrolls: Blades will close permanently on June 30, 2026 and has already been removed from storefronts. The mobile spin-off game was originally released for Android, iOS and Nintendo Switch in May 2020 and featured classic first-person dungeon crawling gameplay and a story following the titular Blades, who have been exiled after the Great War. Now, after six years of service, The Elder Scrolls: Blades will no longer be available to players after June.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades is just one of Bethesda's mobile games, with other titles such as Fallout Shelter and The Elder Scrolls: Castles remain active until further notice. Compared to the mostly positive reception of these other titles, The Elder Scrolls: Blades received largely negative reviews and received a score of 37 on OpenCritic. Some of this criticism stemmed from the game's monetization model, which is a free-to-play game with microtransactions that many players felt encouraged pay-to-win strategies.
One more in-game message The Elder Scrolls: Blades players announced plans to shut down the game's servers on June 30. Gamers have also discovered it The Elder Scrolls: Blades has already been removed from storefronts such as Google Play, the Apple App Store, and the Nintendo eShop pending this shutdown. For players who already have the game installed on their device, they can continue playing until the shutdown date of June 30, but the game cannot be accessed by players who want to launch it for the first time.
One benefit of this impending shutdown is that Bethesda is offering a deep discount on all merchandise offered in The Elder Scrolls: Blades' store in the game. Items will cost only 1 Gem or 1 Sigil each, and all players will receive a pack of these currencies to allow them to access all content The Elder Scrolls: Blades has to offer before the game is taken offline for good. While the news of this suspension may be disappointing to fans, at least they can have free reign over the game's content for the next two months.
The Elder Scrolls: Blade's suspension comes at a stagnant time for the franchise
Elder scrolls fans are currently in a state of limbo, with the next mainline game on the horizon, but little else to get excited about. Last year's release of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered marked a significant entry into the long wait for the next mainline game's release, but few updates on The Elder Scrolls 6s development after the initial announcement at E3 2018 has only piled on the anticipation. While Bethesda's Todd Howard has confirmed that the majority of the studio is now working on The Elder Scrolls 6the game is likely still several years away from release.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades has served as one of the options for fans to find refuge in during this long wait, but that option is about to be taken off the table. Thankfully, there are still other options available to pass the time, such as the aforementioned Oblivion remastered. For Nintendo Switch 2 owners, Skyrim just received a 60 FPS update on console, making it the perfect time to dive back in for another playthrough. Mobile Elder Scrolls: Blades players can instead switch to play The Elder Scrolls: Castleswhere they can manage their kingdom, expand and customize their castle, and send subjects out to explore and collect valuable items from dungeons. Although these games may not fill the exact void left The Elder Scrolls: Bladesplayers can at least keep themselves busy in the world of Tamriel until The Elder Scrolls 6 lets go.
