One of Bethesda Game Studio’s Elder Scrolls spin-offs, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, will be shutting down in June, according to a post on the Nintendo eShop.
The free-to-play dungeon crawler and town-builder’s last day will be June 30, after which the game’s servers will go offline, rendering the entire game inaccessible. In the meantime, all items in The Elder Scrolls: Blades’ store will be purchasable with a single Sigil or Gem, so players can “enjoy all the content Blades has to offer,” according to Bethesda.
Blades released in 2019 and saw players battling through dungeons to score loot, then returning to town to upgrade and customize the settlement. The game additionally included one-on-one arena PvP battles, with cross-play and cross-progression across devices.
While Blades was a mobile game, it was also available on Nintendo Switch. The game is no longer available to download on Nintendo’s platform (though its store page still exists) and has also been delisted from the Google Play and Apple app stores.
Blades isn’t the first Elder Scrolls game to disappear in recent memory. The digital card game The Elder Scrolls Legends shut down in January 2025. It also joins a long list of service games to shut down this year, including the high-profile shooter Highguard and a recently released PUBG spin-off.
However, Blades isn’t the only mobile, free-to-play Elder Scrolls game out there. Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls: Castles, a Fallout Shelter-like spin on the fantasy series, in 2024. It’s still available and receiving updates, with its latest update having arrived in January.
Even if Bethesda has technically released several Elder Scrolls titles (including Oblivion Remastered) in the last few years, fans are eager for more information about the next mainline game in the series, The Elder Scrolls 6. The highly-anticipated RPG was announced back in 2018, a fact Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard recently joked about and asked fans to pretend never happened.
As for when players can expect to see The Elder Scrolls 6, Howard said Bethesda isn’t rushing its development, in part because it has a roster of games like Starfield and Fallout 76 that are still being actively played and worked on. That being said, development on The Elder Scrolls 6 sounds like it’s going smoother than Starfield due to one key reason.