Mojang Stops Minecraft Legends Development Less Than a Year Since Launch
- Laurent Giret
- Jan 10, 2024
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Minecraft Legends, a Minecraft-themed RTS game released on all platforms in April 2023 is about to receive its final update. The game has received a couple of updates since launch, but Mojang Studios announcing its end of support today after less than a year on the market is quite unexpected.
“Since launch, we’ve listened to community feedback and implemented a series of changes and tweaks to make the game better. With that complete, we’re now going to take a step back from development,” the Minecraft team explained today.
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The team didn’t really explain why it was stopping development on the game, but players can be assured that Minecraft Legends isn’t shutting down. “We will of course continue to offer technical support to players, and we won’t be removing any functionalities or features from the game. PvP and co-op will also remain fully functional,” the team said.
Minecraft Legends is one of the rare first-party games from Microsoft that shipped on all platforms including PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, but it was released to little fanfare. The game probably received far less attention than Minecraft Dungeons, a Diablo-like dungeon crawler that was also released on all platforms in 2020. Minecraft Dungeons also reached end of support in September 2023 after being played by over 25 million players, which is definitely not bad.
Minecraft Legends received mixed reviews at launch, with many players criticizing its lack of depth compared to other real-time strategy games. In retrospect, the game looks like an experiment that didn’t really work out, and its multiplatform release and day-one availability in Game Pass probably didn’t generate enough momentum to justify long-term support.
Even though Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time with over 300 million copies sold since launch, developer Mojang Studios has yet to produce another hit. It’s also strange that more than 3 years after the launch of 9th generation consoles, the developer has yet to release a version of Minecraft that takes full advantage of the hardware of the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.