Bethesda Game Studios
Fallout 76 Opts out of Steam
Bethesda is one of the three largest third-party publishers in the gaming business, alongside Ubisoft and EA. Their parent company, ZeniMax Media, owns six studios. While we normally think of Bethesda as the “Elder Scrolls and Fallout” developer, their sister companies make a wide variety of games. Their size as a publisher allows them great negotiating power in the industry. They are exercising some of that power with Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Legends; Bethesda wants to change how and where their games are played.
Fallout 76 is set to release only three years after Fallout 4, but it represents the series’ first foray into multiplayer. Notably, when the game launches on PC later this year, it won’t be available via Steam. Instead, Bethesda is abandoning the world’s most widely used client in favor of its own site, Bethesda.net.
Bethesda isn’t the first publisher to turn its back on Valve and Steam, of course. EA’s Origin and Ubisoft’s Uplay preceded it, but Bethesda’s move is no less symbolic of where things are going, moving forward. Publishers want to use their software as a focal point of their gaming habits, and as a way of driving increased earnings via their own platforms. Officially, Bethesda stated they wanted a more “direct relationship with the customer, that didn’t involve somebody else.”
Bethesda: Crossplay “Non-Negotiable”
Bethesda might be snubbing Steam, but they want everyone included for cross-play when it comes to Elder Scrolls: Legends, a digital card game. In an interview with Game Informer on Aug. 11, Bethesda’s Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines, confessed that the company wants to allow players from all platforms to have the same game. But the real kicker is that he claimed the functionality was “non-negotiable,” implying that any publisher or client that stood in its way was liable to not be made an available platform.
Andrew Reiner, the executive editor at Game Informer, notes that “Hines didn’t outright name Sony in any capacity, but unless Bethesda is doing something different with its cross-platform efforts that conflicts with the freedom Xbox One and Switch currently allow, it has to be PlayStation 4.”
I mentioned earlier that mounting pressure was the only way Sony would ever relinquish its insistence on not allowing crossplay, and with Bethesda now joining the fray —albeit with a relatively small digital card game— in such a determined fashion, this might be the start of movement that sees crossplay become the norm between rival platforms.
