Mojang's Scrolls is Shutting Down

[Steven Bogos]

Mojang's Scrolls is Shutting Down

The next update for strategic card battler Scrolls will be its last, with servers shutting down next year.

Unfortunately, most of you will be most familar with Minecraft dev Mojang's strategic card battler Scrolls via the blog post [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116271-Mojang-and-Bethesda-Settle-Scrolls-Suit] that the game's next update will be its last.

"The launch of the Scrolls beta was a great success. Tens of thousands of players battled daily, and many of them remain active today," reads the post. "Unfortunately, the game has reached a point where it can no longer sustain continuous development."

"Scrolls will still be available to purchase for the time being, and our servers will run until at least July 1st, 2016. All future proceeds will go towards keeping Scrolls playable for as long as possible," continued the post.

"We've had a great time working on Scrolls, and appreciate every last player who's downloaded our game. Extra big thanks to the most dedicated members of our community; some of you have logged in almost every day since release and dedicated a large portion of your time to dominating the leaderboards and taking care of new players."

It's a shame to see Mojang's first post-Minecraft project go up in flames like this, but I guess in a world dominated by The Elder Scrolls: Legends [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/hearthstone] can shake things up.

Source: Mojang [https://scrolls.com/2015/06/its-been-a-blast-automaton]

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[NickBrahz]

Completely forgot this game existed i only remember that whole Scrolls thing years back, did anybody really play this game or did people just play it for a few hours because it was made by Mojang and then drop it.

 

[Bat Vader]

Completely forgot this game existed i only remember that whole Scrolls thing years back, did anybody really play this game or did people just play it for a few hours because it was made by Mojang and then drop it.

I completely forgot it existed too. Sucks that's it's going to be shutting down next year.

 

[Jake Martinez]

I can summarize Scrolls very simply:

Came out around the same time as Hearthstone.
Not as good as Hearthstone.
Costs more money than Hearthstone to play.

There are various other niggling bits about why it's not a good game, but the above should give people the gist of it.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I can summarize Scrolls very simply:

Came out around the same time as Hearthstone.
Not as good as Hearthstone.
Costs more money than Hearthstone to play.

There are various other niggling bits about why it's not a good game, but the above should give people the gist of it.

Superior competition with a similar (if not identical) concept will often destroy you if you don't have something very unique about you. I'm guessing Scrolls didn't have enough different about it to justify playing both?

Anyway, put me in the camp of people who remember it only because of the Bethesda thing.

 

[SupahEwok]

I didn't even know it was out, in any form... I was actually just wondering about what happened to it the other day when Bethesda announced their own CCG.

 

[SamTheNewb]

Microsoft has no plans for Mojang. Or at least, they don't have any plans regarding new game development. So of course Scrolls means nothing to them. Doesn't make sense for Microsoft to own that product. They wouldn't know what to do with it, so it goes down the bin.

 

[EndlessSporadic]

Forgot this was a thing, and now that I've remembered I thought it was still in development/closed beta. Best of luck to the development team on their future endeavors.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Scrolls also had little marketing to go on, and while one can blame Microsoft for not pushing it post-buyout, the damage was already done prior to that. When the only spotlight the game ever got was due to the Bethesda lawsuit, it should show how little Mojang seemed to care for its own project.
I never played it myself but from what I've heard it was a subpar game anyway so its little surprise it couldn't stand the heat of competition with a superior product.
I enjoy Hearthstone personally and feel its solid enough to weather most contenders. Developers, if you're going to make a game in a genre with stiff competition, you might want to think about marketing it well because I had forgotten this game existed until this news broke. I didn't even know it had made it out of beta, or if I did read that somewhere, there wasn't enough word of mouth about it and that alone says more than anything else.
Sucks for the people who worked on it but thats how this shit works. How many physical card games have lasted since Magic: The Gathering became a big deal? Why did the contenders fizzle? Because they were either poorly made or poorly marketed or both. Can't just jump on a bandwagon and expect to make it. Hell too many MMO's have been made trying to ride the coattails of WoW only to be left in the dust because they didn't do enough to make themselves stand out against the competition.
I don't feel this is anyone's fault except the people who failed to make it shine and I refuse to blame Microsoft for a poor product developed prior to them buying Mojang.

 

[Karadalis]

Dont forget that the full blown new FTP Magic the gathering game is comming out pretty soon.

With that one AND hearthstone two giants stand against it wich leaves scrolls pretty much in the dust.

CCG players are usually pretty loyal to their choosen games due to investment into a card collection being a big motivation to keep playing.

 

[Something Amyss]

I didn't even know it was out, in any form... I was actually just wondering about what happened to it the other day when Bethesda announced their own CCG.

The first and--until now--only time I saw it mentioned post-lawsuit was in a Humble Bundle. I wonder if part of their problem wasn't just marketing.

 

[Rack]

I can summarize Scrolls very simply:

Came out around the same time as Hearthstone.
Not as good as Hearthstone.
Costs more money than Hearthstone to play.

There are various other niggling bits about why it's not a good game, but the above should give people the gist of it.

Every single one of those is false.

It was first available way before Hearthstone.

It was a bit more complex and slower paced than Hearthstone but way deeper.

The upfront cost was more than Hearthstone in that it existed at the start (it's free now though) but it's far far cheaper by any other measure.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

blame this on poor marketing. i heard about this during Scroll-gate, and then nothing after. had they leveraged the power of their name after minecraft, this could have become something. instead, it faded into obscurity.

 

[Summerstorm]

Maaaan... i just bought it... two years ago or something. That will teach me to fund the "underdog".

 

[ron1n]

I can summarize Scrolls very simply:

Came out around the same time as Hearthstone.
Not as good as Hearthstone.
Costs more money than Hearthstone to play.

There are various other niggling bits about why it's not a good game, but the above should give people the gist of it.

Every single one of those is false.

It was first available way before Hearthstone.

It was a bit more complex and slower paced than Hearthstone but way deeper.

The upfront cost was more than Hearthstone in that it existed at the start (it's free now though) but it's far far cheaper by any other measure.

This ^

Was much more complex and a single match would run way longer than a hearthstone game. Was actually a lot more fun and interesting for it though. But as expected, the shorter, simpler format of Hearthstone was always going to appeal to a larger player base.

And it was actually way more generous in terms of getting the cards you needed to build decks since it allowed card trading. Hearthstone is 100x a bigger grind.

But yeah, match length was the killer for me. As much as I enjoyed it, couldn't justify spending upwards of 30 minutes plus (often) per game. I do hope someone does something similar though in terms of the card + board mechanics as it made for a fun take on the CCG.

 

[Aerosteam]

Microsoft bought Minecraft, not Mojang (metaphorically speaking).

I bet Microsoft were like "what's this thing doing here? I don't remember buying this. Wait... this is costing us money! GET OF RID IT!".

 

[Shocksplicer]

Microsoft bought Minecraft, not Mojang (metaphorically speaking).

I bet Microsoft were like "what's this thing doing here? I don't remember buying this. Wait... this is costing us money! GET OF RID IT!".

Nope, Microsoft owns Mojang in its entirety, not just Minecraft.

OT: hard to feel sorry for them, they didn't hother doing any publicity or marketing to make it so people know it exists...

 

[Lightspeaker]

Every single one of those is false.

It was first available way before Hearthstone.

Hearthstone was released March 2014. Scrolls was released December 2014. Even if you go back to open beta stage (i.e. the very first stage when anyone could join in) Scrolls was OB June 2013 and Hearthstone January 2014. I'd hardly claim what Jake said is "false" in light of that; its not exactly a gigantic difference.


On topic: Unlike a few of the above I knew it was out but...honestly I never saw any reason to want to play. You had to buy it to play it and it was decidedly not particularly cheap. I actually had to google to find out how much it cost now because I couldn't find a price clearly displayed on the main Scrolls website, apparently they reduced it down to a few pounds which is more reasonable but I don't really see any point in buying in anymore since its closing. If they'd advertised that price cut better then maybe they'd have done better.

To ruminate for a bit I somewhat feel that the failure of Scrolls was partly down to a certain amount of hubris. I don't mean that in a particularly insulting way but what I mean is I think Notch/Mojang made the same mistake with Minecraft and Scrolls as Nintendo made with the Wii and the Wii U. They both assumed that because the former was a gigantic success without a particularly monumental effort on their part outside of making the product that anything they followed it up with would be an equally huge success with a similar level of effort.

But that isn't how these things work. The Wii was one of the most insane successes seen in the games industry. Everyone bought a Wii. It sold millions upon millions more than a Nintendo console would normally expect to sell and so Nintendo figured it didn't need to do anything special with the Wii U in order to get the same success. So they half-arsed the marketing for it and that turned out to be a relative disaster. To this day there are still some people who think the Wii U is an accessory for the Wii.

Scrolls suffered the same fate. Minecraft was a gigantic success founded pretty much entirely on word of mouth and youtube. So why should the now multi-billion dollars valued company Mojang put any particular effort into marketing Scrolls? Surely everyone already knows about their company and hence people will flood in droves to buy it if its good?

But the thing is the quality of the product DOESN'T MATTER if nobody knows about it or if its marketed poorly. The Wii U is actually a nice console with some decent games. I'm sure Scrolls is a very well put-together game. But the Wii and Minecraft are both freak exceptions to the rule and thus relying on replicating their success the same way isn't going to work. You really must market properly if you are going to get people to buy.

 

[RicoADF]

Maaaan... i just bought it... two years ago or something. That will teach me to fund the "underdog".

And people wonder why I wont buy games that require servers to run, I present exhibit A. game becomes useless at some arbitrary point in time because of costs. I can still play my oldest PS1, PC etc games but a 2 year old game is now dead because fuck the consumer and their rights.

 

[Aerosteam]

Microsoft bought Minecraft, not Mojang (metaphorically speaking).

I bet Microsoft were like "what's this thing doing here? I don't remember buying this. Wait... this is costing us money! GET OF RID IT!".

Nope, Microsoft owns Mojang in its entirety, not just Minecraft.

I know, that's why I added "metaphorically speaking".