ZeniMax has removed The Elder Scrolls Online's Web Crown Store from elderscrollsonline.com, telling players the change was made "to help manage workload" after Microsoft's layoffs. Community manager Kevin Gbolie announced the decision on the game's forums, saying the browser storefront came down on Wednesday, July 22.
The Crown Store is the MMO's premium-currency shop, selling cosmetics, mounts, furnishings and other items for crowns. Players can still buy crowns through the website, but browsing and purchasing the items themselves now requires logging into the game. Gbolie said the monthly Crown Store Showcase blog is changing for the same reason and will become "more list-like than anything else", which he attributed to team bandwidth.
Knock-on effects for the community wiki
The change also reaches the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki, which leaned on the blog's high-resolution official screenshots to document store items. Gbolie said the team responsible for the blog and those screenshots no longer has the capacity to supply them at the previous scale, and that it would provide what it could and adjust from there.
The goal is to provide what we can.
PC Gamer reports that Microsoft's cuts earlier this month removed 379 staff across ZeniMax, the second such round in two years, and that the studio now describes itself as being the same size it was a decade ago. The same round of cuts cancelled ZeniMax's unannounced MMO, Project Blackbird.
The storefront changes land shortly after The Elder Scrolls Online introduced a new seasonal content structure, which the remaining team will now have to sustain with reduced capacity. Neither Rock Paper Shotgun nor PC Gamer reported any change to the items being sold in the in-game store itself, and Gbolie said the range on offer is unaffected. The forum post was published the day before the storefront came down.
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