The Bethesda Launcher will be shut down on May 11
You’ll be able to transfer your games, wallet, and most of your saves, to Steam from April 27.
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Back in February, Bethesda announced plans toplace a merciful bullet in the brainpan of the Bethesda Launcher, an unloved alternative to certain other popular digital game management programs. Those plans have since been elaborated in an update to ablog post about sunsetting the launcher and migrating to Steam. “If you do have games through the Bethesda.net launcher,” it says, “don’t worry. Starting on April 27 you’ll be able to migrate your games and Wallet to your Steam account.”
Detailed instructions on what to do will be provided on April 27. Some games will have their saves transfer over automatically, while others will require manually copying them into the relevant folder. “At this time,” Bethesda writes, “we expect almost all save progress to be transferable automatically or manually with the exception of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, which currently is unable to transfer.” DLC and in-game currency will automatically transfer, which is good news
The Bethesda Launcher will remain up and running until May 11, but even if you don’t get all your games transferred over to Steam by the time someone with a high enough Speech skill convinces it to self-destruct, you’ll still be able to transfer them after that.
Don’t throw away your Bethesda.net login details, either. “For games that require it, you will still use your Bethesda.net login to sign in to play. Your Bethesda.net account will not be lost and will still be accessible on our website and in-game, and we will continue supporting all Bethesda.net accounts with our future titles.”
While it never managed to annoy me as much as Uplay, now known asUbisoftConnect, which still fails to launch if I tick the “remember my details” box when I login, the Bethesda Launcher was an unlovely bit of software that I won’t miss—at least, once I’ve migrated my copies of Arx Fatalis and Quake 2 over to Steam.
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Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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