Mojang’s card-battler Scrolls has had a turbulent existence, to say the least. Originally announced way back in 2011, Scrolls wouldn’t even enter a beta period until June of 2013. Then, that beta period went on for a looong time, finally ending with the game’s official release on desktop and Android in December of last year. Oh, and in the middle of all that Bethesda sued Mojang over the use of the word “Scrolls" thinking it might create confusion with their long-running The Elder Scrolls series. (That lawsuit made a whole lot more sense after Bethesda announced their own card-battler called The Elder Scrolls Legends at E3 this year.) Anyway, long development cycles and lawsuits aside, poor old Scrolls just never found a mainstream audience. And as such, Mojang has officially announced today that they’ll no longer be actively developing new content for Scrolls.
Now, this doesn’t mean Mojang is completely abandoning Scrolls, not yet anyway. They’ll continue to sell the game for now and have guaranteed that the servers that the game runs on will stay operational until at least July 1st, 2016. Any revenue generated by the game will go towards extending that time. Also, based on some comments by Mojang’s Mans Olson in the Scrolls subreddit, the team would eventually like to find a way to ensure the game can continue to be played indefinitely. Whether that means Mojang releases the server code so that players can just host their own games, or something else altogether, remains to be seen. Finally, while the recent Echoes update will be the last content update for the game, Mojang will continue to monitor the balance of Scrolls and will issue updates when necessary if they spot an issue they want to address.
As for Scrolls on iOS? Well, I haven’t heard anything officially, but it’s pretty likely that’s not going to happen now. While Mojang will keep things going for the next year, and potentially longer for their dedicated players, Scrolls is essentially a dead game now. If the promised iPad version is far enough along then perhaps it would make sense to release it still, but I kind of doubt it. Mojang says they’ve been getting A TON of questions about their announcement, unsurprisingly, and they’ll be posting a FAQ with the most common ones soon. So perhaps we’ll know the official fate of the iOS version of Scrolls then, but either way, the writing appears to be on the wall pointing towards the end for this card battler.
