Another game is going away from Steam: Bethesda will close its Elder Scrolls Card Game five years after its last update.

The Elder Scrolls: Legends, a digital card game from Bethesda, has been removed off Steam five years after its last update. It is scheduled to go offline by the end of January.

When it launched in 2017, we called The Elder Scrolls: Legends a "deep and potentially rewarding alternative" to Hearthstone, albeit one which needed a little more juice in the artwork department and a larger playerbase. Despite numerous improvements made after launch, the player numbers never materialized. Hearthstone was able to retain its dominant position in mainstream CCGs.

Bethesda stopped development of the game in 2019 "for the near future," including the cancellation of an expansion scheduled for the winter of that year. Legends was still available in singleplayer and online modes. Monthly rewards and in-game activities continued to be offered.

All of this will soon come to an abrupt end. The Elder Scrolls: Legends has been removed from Steam and a message in the game says that the servers will be permanently shut down on January 30, 2025.

The message reads: "From now until the 30th of January 2025, you can purchase all items from the store, and enter in-game events for just one gold. This will allow you to enjoy all that Legends has on offer." On that date, the servers will be shut off and the game inaccessible. We thank you for playing Legends and hope you enjoyed it.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction to another game being discontinued is disappointment. The Elder Scrolls: Legends Steam player numbers weren't spectacular - just a few hundred players at any one time in the past few years - but the game is available on mobile which would push this number higher, though not high enough to justify continuing operation.

Some players are also upset at losing access to the game they have invested real money in. Legends was a free game, but it offered in-app purchases to encourage players to spend their money.

Jason Coleman, President of Sparkypants Studios and The Elder Scrolls: Legends developer, told PC Gamer that they were only responsible for maintaining the game. "I have no insight into the decision making process. I'm sure many people, including those at ZeniMax, want it to continue forever.

"I don't care what the reason is, I feel bad for the players when a game is no longer available."

This year, the issue of games going off-line and leaving players stranded has received a lot of attention. Stop Killing Games was launched in April, following Ubisoft’s decision to discontinue The Crew. A few months later, California passed a law that requires retailers to warn customers that digital games can be lost if servers go offline. Steam added a disclaimer in October to this effect, warning that customers are not actually purchasing the games that they purchase, but rather paying for a licence to use them.