Bethesda: We’re Not Leaving Steam, Even With What’s Happening With Fallout 76

You might have seen the news a few days ago that Bethesda won’t be bringing Fallout 76 to the Steam service, instead utilizing its own Bethesda.net launcher service for its players. But does that mean all future Bethesda releases will be taking this route? Not so fast.

Over the course of the weekend, IGN had a chance to speak with Bethesda’s Pete Hines during the QuakeCon event and asked him about the fate of future Bethesda games following the forthcoming co-op supported holiday hit. Hines made it clear that they weren’t done with the service, even though they were moving towards a dedicated service.

“We did not announce ‘all future Bethesda games will not be on Steam,’” he explained. “That is not what we saw. We said ‘this game will be available exclusively on Bethesda.net.’”

But there is a slight chance that it could affect one particular title in the future, as Bethesda may be weighing in options for its first-person shoot-stravaganza (yes, it’s a word) Doom Eternal. Said Hines, “We haven’t decided on anything else, this is specific to Fallout 76 given the kind of game it is — it’s an online, ongoing game. (Doom Eternal) may or may not, but it hasn’t been decided on anything else yet.”
As for Fallout 76 ever coming to Steam (instead of just launching), Hines simply noted, “Is it possible? I guess, but I honestly couldn’t give you any guarantee one way or the other on whether it will or won’t.”

And even though it might have been made clear earlier, Hines reiterated why Fallout is coming to the Bethesda.net launcher. Basically, “we feel like the best way for us to provide the best experience and service to our customers is to be dealing with them directly, and not through someone else.”

Now the real question is when the company will be letting consumers test it out. We still haven’t gotten any sort of date for the forthcoming B.E.T.A. yet; and the Bethesda.net Launcher service hasn’t even been properly tested with the game, as far as we know. So we’ll just have to wait and see, it seems…

Fallout 76 will release on November 14 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. You can watch the full QuakeCon 2018 Fallout panel above!