Darvond: Starting in April, the Bethesda Launcher will be no more.
This is surprises me somewhat, as the Bethesda launcher was something of the cash cow, given it served as the centeral modding hub for Todd Howard's failed attempts to turn unplayable sprawls into income generation platforms via playing players to fix their fucking problems.
Pardon, snapped a little at the end there. Did you expect the Bethesda launcher to be killed off this swiftly? What other parts do you expect to be shuttered?
Microsoft bought them, so....nope. Microsoft is bringing stuff again to Steam, so...not really a surprise.
Microsoft wants to put a lot of their 1st party games on PC Game Pass & XBox Console Game Pass especially; and also Steam.
I can see them (Bethesda) making these games for every store and just building stuff like servers needs, mods sections for Bethesda Account, and/or whatever DIRECTLY into the game - like say Quake Enhanced & Doom Remastered Collection did - and then porting to any store and then just sticking that store's DRM on top.
Steamisbetter: All launchers should go to hell where they belong. Steam is better! Pretenders rip-oofs and wannabes are bad.
I'm fine w/ launchers existing and all - but it's their poor implementation that's the problem; often w/ it being DRM and/or soft-versions of DRM in so many ways that's really annoying.
I shouldn't need a launcher to run a game, especially if it's single-player; that option should be up to me.
And launchers should have built-in offline installation options and whatnot too, IMHO - if they are too exist and all.
Of course, I should be able to do game installs w/out the launcher too - think of what GOG does by giving you BIN files and a EXE to do the install offline. Those should also always be updated to the newest version too.
And Achievements should be built into the game itself to work offline too; especially single-player ones. See what Divinity 2 DKS did, when most PC titles weren't even trying the Achievements thing.
Launchers should be OPTIONAL in every single way, often as a convenience for whatever needs - often can be very useful for patching-up games and getting them up-to-date.
