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Mojang’s Scrolls Has Run Out Of Parchment, Game To End As Early As One Year From Now
Mojang has announced that as soon as just over a year from now, its collectible strategy game Scrolls (our review) will be shut down. The developer, which is now owned by Microsoft, shared the news outlining the plan for the game’s final 12 months.
Scrolls spent years in testing (during which time its name survived a legal dispute with Bethesda) before launching in December. The title, which carries a premium price (rather than being free-to-play), with additional Scrolls (playable cards) available with in-game and real-money currency.
The Echoes update, which launched earlier this month, will be the game’s final content add-on, though the team will continue to tweak balance. The servers won’t be shut down any earlier than July 1, 2016, with any additional proceeds from sales of the game and currency supplementing server costs for as long as possible.
“The launch of the Scrolls beta was a great success,” Mojang writes. “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.”
[Source: Mojang]
Our Take
Even though this is a premium-priced game (and not free-to-play) there are server costs involved that are exceeding revenue. I wonder if a shift to Microsoft’s cloud servers, which should be able to mitigate some cost by scaling better than a traditional structure, would help keep this game alive longer (though there is undoubtedly a separate cost for migration).
While Microsoft is doing right by the Minecraft community so far (and the extended warning is the right move here), this is an unfortunate reality for the publisher to have to face so early in its ownership.
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