Bethesda kills its game launcher, will migrate users to Steam

techradar.com:

Steam is in the news today for two reasons: firstly, Bethesda is killing off its game launcher, and shifting players over to Steam instead, and secondly, Valve is taking some action against dodgy discounts on its game store.

We’ll come back to the latter, but let’s start with the ‘sunsetting’ of the Bethesda.net launcher, which is soon to happen. In fact, starting from April, users will be able to migrate from Bethesda’s game launcher to Steam, taking all their games and wallet with them.

Bethesda posted to say: “We would like to thank you for your support and assure you that all of your games are safe.”

The firm further clarified: “You have plenty of time to plan and begin migrating your Bethesda.net library to your Steam account. The migration to Steam will include your game library and Wallet – meaning you will not lose anything from your Bethesda.net account.”

The saves you may have for “many” games will also be migrated to Steam automatically, but there may be a few titles which require manually moving the saves over. There are further details on how this manual process will work, and answers to other questions you may have, in Bethesda’s FAQ right here.

You’ll be able to use the Bethesda launcher until May 2021, but the company advises that as soon as the Steam migration process is made available, you should go through it.

Note that anyone with a Bethesda account will still have it, and be able to sign into it on the website (or with games that need it); it’s just the launcher software which is being ditched.

This move will be a relief to some, of course – there are multiple game launchers around these days from publishers, on top of stores like Steam, Epic and others, meaning some gamers definitely get frustrated about