Wave goodbye to Bethesda’s terrible launcher as they start their big migration to Steam

Today’s the day Bethesda crack open the humongous blast shields at their base in Rockville, Maryland, finally taking the brave step of plonking their back catalog and future games fully onto Steam after six years of trying to make their own launcher happen. Don’t worry, you’ll have the option to transfer over your games, saves and wallet balance until May 11th. You’ll have to redownload everything unfortunately, but any game you happen to own via the Bethesda.net Launcher should appear as a free purchase on a linked Steam account.

Most saves should transfer over automatically but some Bethesda games might need fiddling with to sort this out – here’s a list of the affected games in case you want to check. There’s also some specific info on moving Fallout 76 across to Steam, too. In short, it looks like it just makes things awkward for anyone with a Fallout 1st membership by automatically canceling that and banking all the Atoms they’re due to receive for the rest of their subscription period. Bethesda have also confirmed that you’ll still need to sign in with a Bethesda.net account for many of their games on Steam to access mods and in-game items.

We’ve known since February that Bethesda was planning to bin their launcher in favor of Valve’s vastly more popular storefront. If you’ve ever used the Bethesda.net Launcher and still need to check how to go about transferring your games, then there’s an FAQ over at Bethesda’s site that can help start you off. It was last updated two weeks ago but Bethesda say more details are coming later on today.

Bethesda have some pretty big projects in the works. Foremost among them is Starfield, which will be available on Steam even if it’s now exclusively a Microsoft joint like The Elder Scrolls 6. Graham had a listen to the most recent update on Starfield yesterday when composer Inon Zur and audio director Mark Lampert shared some details on how music and sound feature in the game. Bethesda have also touted on Twitter that they’re adding some classic Elder Scrolls and Wolfenstein games to Steam, including Daggerfall and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, which is always good to see.

You can still download the Bethesda Launcher at the Bethesda Softworks site if you want to store a copy on your ‘puter for posterity. Quickly, though – you’ve only got two weeks left to access it.