Back in February, Bethesda announced plans to place 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 a blog 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.
- GOG's bespoke cut of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall gets delisted tomorrow, so you've got a day to grab it for free as the store works out how 'to publish and maintain such projects better' in future
- EA announces the guillotine will finally fall on Origin this April thanks to Microsoft's abandonment of 32-bit Windows and, if you don't like it, 'use a newer computer'
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 as Ubisoft Connect, 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.
