Can’t wait to play Fallout 76 on Steam? Well, it looks like you’re gonna be waiting for a while. Apparently, Bethesda is going its own way for the PC release of Fallout 76 and cutting Steam out of the picture.
According to comments made by the company, Fallout 76 on PC will be playable only through Bethesda.net and the Bethesda Launcher Client which powers The Elder Scrolls Online. It’s unclear exactly why Bethesda is choosing to abandon Steam, but it likely has to do with money. Valve takes a nice chunk of each sale on the Steam storefront, so perhaps Bethesda is looking to bank as many caps as they can with this release and try to get players to adopt the Bethesda PC game client with a popular franchise like Fallout.
Whatever the reasoning, it could be a while before we see Fallout 76 on Steam if we see it at all. Bethesda has tried this route before, and in the case of Fallout Shelter, it took the game almost a year to make it to Steam after first launching on their own distribution platform.
The Fallout 76 Beta is slated for October, and anyone who has pre-ordered the game will be able to try it out before the November launch. Bethesda recently revealed that the Fallout 76 Beta would consist of the entire game, with progress that players make during the beta carrying over into the full release.
Fallout 76 is still very much shrouded in mystery at this point. Bethesda will do their best to answer questions regarding Fallout 76 during a scheduled live stream Q&A event during QuakeCon 2018 where Todd Howard and other BGS developers will taking a deep dive on the game.
You can tune into that stream on Bethesda’s Mixer and Twitch channels on Saturday, August 11th at 11am CT.
