Nearly every developer would have trouble trying to match the incredible success of a game like Minecraft, including Minecraft’s own creators, Stockholm-based Mojang AB.
In 2012, the then-independent studio began working on a card battling mobile game called Scrolls, and after lengthy alpha and beta phases, the game was released in December 2014. Today, less than a year after its release, Mojang has decided to cease all further work on the game.
“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,” Mojang wrote on the official Scrolls blog. “We won’t be adding features or sets from now on, though we are planning to keep a close eye on game balance.”
Mojang said that Scrolls will still be available for purchase “for the time being,” and the studio plans on funneling all of the game’s future proceeds toward keeping the servers running through at least July 1, 2016.
“The launch of the Scrolls beta was a great success,” the studio said. “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.”
When Scrolls was first envisioned by Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson, there were few competitors in the digital trading card game space, but now the genre is almost completely dominated by Blizzard Entertainment’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. Both Bethesda Game Studios and Electronic Arts are also working on their own collectible card games—The Elder Scrolls: Legends and Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, respectively.
The news that development on Scrolls has ended has been met with dismay by the game’s fans, though few appear to be shocked by the announcement.
“Well that’s a big f–k you to the playerbase,” one user wrote on the Scrolls subreddit, “though I guess it’s finally time to face reality and the facts that this game didn’t make any money at all.”
Some fans blamed the game’s cancellation on executive meddling on the part of Microsoft, which purchased Mojang shortly before Scrolls was launched last year.
Image credit: Mojang AB