You'll now need to boot up the game to browse its shop

Image credit: ZeniMax

Following Microsoft's mass layoffs, The Elder Scrolls Online has ended up in a transitional period while remaining staff work to forge a path forwards. If you want evidence of effects the cuts are already starting to have on the MMO, look no further than its Crown Store.

ESO's version of the premium currency cash shop that's become a hallmark of most massive online games with stuff to hawk - for real money, in-game money, or either depending on how much time you want to spend grinding - is undergoing some changes following the cuts.

"To help manage workload, we have decided to remove the Web Crown Store from the official elderscrollsonline.com website on Wednesday, July 22nd," ZeniMax community manager Kevin Gbolie wrote in an update on the game's forums yesterday, spotted by PC Gamer. "The ability to acquire crowns via the website will remain and, of course, this does not affect the items that will be offered on the Crown Store in The Elder Scrolls Online, you will just need to login into the game to view and purchase the latest offerings. Furthermore, for the same reason, the monthly Crown Store Showcase blog will also change."

So, you'll still be able to buy virtual cash via the game's website, but to browse the store you'll need to boot up the game. Gbolie noted that the blog changes are "due to team bandwidth", and will see these rundowns of new stuff players can buy become "more list-like than anything else".

Aside from the obvious impact on people buying the outfits, furnishings, mounts, and more sold via the store, the web version's demise will also have consequences for the MMO's pages on the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) wiki, who are losing easy access to high resolution official screenshots they currently lean on. "The goal is to provide what we can," Gbolie added in a comment. "Especially because we know folks like UESP do use those shots. But to be blunt, the team responsible for the blog and those screenshots doesn't have the capacity to provide those at the scale we could before. But we will provide what we can for now and adjust from there."

Given ESO's likely in a position following the mass cuts where demonstrating that the game can keep on being a valuable source of cash for ZeniMax and Microsoft by extension is paramount, I can only imagine how its remaining developers are feeling as they struggle to hold up the roof on an aspect of ESO which is key to that. My thinking is, if there aren't enough hands left to keep the store running as it was, what sorts of cuts might bits of the game not as tangibly linked to keeping the lights on suffer in the future?