Mojang's "Scrolls" Being Shut Down

When I say “Mojang," you think “Minecraft." The two are ubiquitous—the same way we think “World of Tanks” when you hear “Wargaming.net," “World of Warcraft” when you hear “Blizzard," or “a flying craptastrophy” when you hear “Konami." It’s just what they’re best known for, and it’s easy to forget that, hey, technically they do more than just Minecraft. For example, the canceled 0x10c, and the about-to-be-canceled “Scrolls.”

...Whoops, spoilers.

But yes, Mojangs TCG “Scrolls," which was never really the smash hit that would have warranted a lawsuit from Bethesda, is being ‘soft-canceled.' Which is to say, the next content update, “Echo," will be its last; from that point onward, the game will run for at least a year, with all future purchases of the game going directly into keeping the servers up and running for as long as possible.

“After much deliberation, we’ve come to an important decision that we’d like to share: Echoes will be the last major content patch for Scrolls. We won’t be adding features or sets from now on, though we are planning to keep a close eye on game balance… The launch of the Scrolls beta was a great success. Tens of thousands of players battled daily, and many of them remain active today. Unfortunately, the game has reached a point where it can no longer sustain continuous development.”

It’s always sad when a game like this has to shut down, because you know someone out there has invested innumerable hours into it and are going to be heartbroken, but Scrolls... feels a little less so. Perhaps it was its own bad luck for releasing so soon after the launch of Hearthstone, or perhaps it simply didn’t stack up. But, well… I imagine most of the people reading this had forgotten it had existed at this point.

Still, all games get their moment of silence. Close our eyes, pour a beer to the ground. Enjoy your slow death, Scrolls.