Bethesda has announced that The Elder Scrolls: Blades will be permanently shut down on June 30, 2026, and has already been delisted 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 become exiled after the Great War. Now, after six years of service, The Elder Scrolls: Blades will no longer be accessible to players after June.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades is just one of Bethesda’s mobile games, with other titles like Fallout Shelter and The Elder Scrolls: Castles remaining active for the time being. Compared to the mostly positive reception of these other titles, The Elder Scrolls: Blades received largely negative reviews, garnering a score of 37 on OpenCritic. Part of these criticisms came from the game’s monetization model, being a free-to-play game with microtransactions that many players felt encouraged pay-to-win strategies.
An in-game message to The Elder Scrolls: Blades players announced plans to shutter the game’s servers on June 30. Players have also found that The Elder Scrolls: Blades has already been delisted from storefronts like Google Play, Apple App Store, and Nintendo eShop in anticipation of this shutdown. For players who already have the game installed on their device, they can continue playing until the June 30 shutdown date, but the game can’t be accessed by players looking to start it for the first time.
One upside of this imminent shutdown is that Bethesda is offering a heavy discount on all items offered in The Elder Scrolls: Blades‘ in-game store. Items will cost only 1 Gem or 1 Sigil each, and all players will receive a bundle of these currencies so that they can access all the content The Elder Scrolls: Blades has to offer before the game is taken offline for good. While the news of this shutdown may be disappointing for fans, they can at least have free rein over the game’s content for the next two months.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades’ Shutdown 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 in the long wait for the next mainline game’s release, but few updates on The Elder Scrolls 6‘s development after its initial announcement at E3 2018 have 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 6, the game is likely still several years away from release.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades has been serving as one of the options for fans to find refuge in during this prolonged 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 the console, making it the perfect time to dive back in for another playthrough. Mobile Elder Scrolls: Blades players can instead swap to playing The Elder Scrolls: Castles, where they can manage their kingdom, expand and customize their castle, and send subjects out to explore and collect valuable items from dungeons. While these games might not fill the exact void left by The Elder Scrolls: Blades, players can at least keep themselves occupied within the world of Tamriel until The Elder Scrolls 6 releases.
