Bethesda planned to break away from Steam and focus on its own PC games store and launcher a few years back. However, after low sales for Fallout 76, the company shifted its strategy to release new titles on both Bethesda.net and Steam. Now that Bethesda is part of Microsoft, with a heavy focus on Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC releases, it makes less sense to keep Bethesda.net around, so it will be shutting down next month.
Bethesda initially announced plans to close the Bethesda.net service in February, but specific dates for the move were not revealed at the time. Anyone with a Bethesda.net account will be able to migrate all of their purchases to Steam, including any games and wallet funds.
The transition begins on the 27th of April, and just two weeks later on the 11th of May, the Bethesda.net launcher will close down for good. If you miss this window, then you will still be able to migrate to Steam, but you will want to do it sooner rather than later, as the migration service won't be offered forever.
For the most part, the migration process will be automatic, moving over any wallet funds and game purchases to Steam. In most cases, your save files will also move over automatically, so you won't lose any in-game progress. For some games though, Bethesda warns that you'll need to copy your save file over to the new Steam folder manually.
While the Bethesda.net launcher is going away, Bethesda.net accounts will still be supported and some games will still ask you to sign into a Bethesda.net account. Future titles will also continue to support Bethesda.net, so while the launcher is gone, some remnants will remain.
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KitGuru Says: Bethesda.net was far from the worst launcher, but it was still another unwanted download for many. Did you have any games on Bethesda.net? Will you be migrating everything over to Steam?