Bethesda announced today that they’ll be halting content development for their free-to-play card-battler, Elder Scrolls: Legends. While they won’t be stopping support, or even abandoning the game outright, they don’t intend to continue updating the game with additional content for a while.
A reason hasn’t been given, but one would assume the primary cause is their desire to focus their resources elsewhere. While content development hasn’t been officially canceled, it is considered to be on hold “for the foreseeable future.”
There’s a good chance that’s permanent, given the wording. The game has received a decent amount of support, with eight paid DLC packs coming out since the release of Legends back in 2017. The game received another expansion as recently as this September, so development was still moving steadily.
A likely reason is the incredibly small player base. According to Steamcharts.com, Legends has an average peak of about 1,000 people playing within a 24-hour period. This peak has been steadily declining, with the average number of players being in the mid-600’s as of November of this year.
Given that interest in the game is steadily dwindling, it makes sense that support for it wouldn’t be as viable anymore. So why is the player base dwindling?
Probably because the game isn’t that good if we’re being honest.
Honestly, though, the quality of the game isn’t even the real issue here. Bethesda jumped into the card-game scene in 2017, but even by then it was already completely saturated. Hearthstone continues to dominate the market, along with online versions of Magic: The Gathering continuing to be incredibly popular.
Since then, the market has only become more saturated, and it seems like the industry is starting to dip. CD Projekt Red announced that they would be pulling support for the console versions of their card-game, Gwent. Valve’s Artifact remains a giant meme. Even Hearthstone saw a relative dip in their player base after the fiasco around the Hong Kong revolution that Blizzard seemed to stand against.
So what’s next for Legends? Likely, it’s going to stay available for the sparse hundreds that still enjoy playing the game, but it won’t be getting any new content for a while. Bethesda will be switching gears towards other projects for now. With any luck, they’ll be doing something that releases a good game this next time around, as they’ve been hitting a bit of a rough patch in the last few years with their releases.
