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Bethesda.net launcher


Deathbydestiny

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So Beth has announced it's launching a Steam-like store front for it's games. Reddit is totally losing its collective mind over this.

Two things come to mind here. First, are they really this dumb? Are they really going to use this exclusively? And second, this could be the launch pad for paid mods again.

What do you guys think? I know one thing for certain, things like this make me want to stop playing games entirely.

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Being rabidly anti-Steam I see this as a positive. For instance, the CK for FO4 doesn't force me to log on to Steam to make a mod. I only have to actually log on to something when I want to upload it to their service. I haven't loaded their launcher in over a week because you don't need it to run the CK, only to install and update it when they issue patches for it.

 

As for paid mods, I think you already know I'd welcome their return and I'd happily participate in that. Reddit can blow it out their collective asses :P

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I just looked through a bunch of Fallout subreddits. Nobody on Reddit is talking about this.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4h7955/there_is_now_a_bethesdanet_launcher_a_la_origin/

 

It's in the general games section, not specific to one game.

 

Being rabidly anti-Steam I see this as a positive. For instance, the CK for FO4 doesn't force me to log on to Steam to make a mod. I only have to actually log on to something when I want to upload it to their service. I haven't loaded their launcher in over a week because you don't need it to run the CK, only to install and update it when they issue patches for it.

 

As for paid mods, I think you already know I'd welcome their return and I'd happily participate in that. Reddit can blow it out their collective asses :P

 

You have to think bigger picture here. Think, what's best overall for PC gaming? Competing store fronts are great for PC gaming but at the moment they aren't truly competing. Right now it's just separate companies running store fronts for their exclusive games which only fragments everything. We need to come together as one and at the moment the only one doing that is Steam. Sure, many people dislike Steam and DRM overall but it's whats keeping PC gaming alive right now like it or not. If the other competing stores stopped acting like children by taking their balls and going home then we could truly have that real competition. Adding yet another store front to fragment things is not going to help.

 

Paid mods is a whole other issue though :P and I know you like the idea. I only support it to a degree but from what I have heard, if they try it again it's going to be hit much harder than before. People are ready and they now have a possible heads up to it with this announcement. Beth will really need to have their plan for it air tight for it to work this time around.

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Sure, many people dislike Steam and DRM overall but it's whats keeping PC gaming alive right now like it or not.

GoG.com called, they'd like a word :P

No DRM there. Loads of new titles showing up in increasing numbers. Even Bethesda is embracing them.

https://api.gog.com/products/1458058109

https://api.gog.com/products/1454587428

IMO, DRM is actually what's hurting PC Gaming, not helping. GoG has proven that removal of DRM leads to more sales, and brings in revenue from older titles Valve can't make work on Steam.

Also, Bethesda has not indicated any desire to turn their launcher into a storefront yet, but if they do, I wholeheartedly support that as long as they keep it the way it works now with no online requirement. Legends is due to release soon, so I guess we'll just have to see how they handle that.

 

Beth will really need to have their plan for it air tight for it to work this time around.

The only thing Beth needs to do is stay the course like they wanted to last year. Valve has been removed from the equation so that should no longer be a factor should they want to bring them back at some point.

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Pfft. Who really subscribes to /r/games anyway!

 

Persons who apparently believe that DMR helps gaming on the PC :rofl:

 

If Beth/Zeni introduce any DMR will be end for them , certainly for me, as well as for large number of players on the PC.

If Beth will release their titles on GOG (I mean the others not published there yet) I'll be the first to buy it.

For example Morrowind i hawe on CD(s), STEAM, and GOG Yes, I bought this the game Three Times.

CD because I wanted to have a game, STEAM because I wanted to get rid of DC and GOG because I wanted to get rid of both of the aforementioned.

 

"Valve has been removed from the equation so that should no longer be a factor should they want to bring them back at some point"

I think the best "move" that Beth/Zeni made in recent years.

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No Steam? Good riddance. I for one welcome the paid modding when Valve is not getting 40% if those extra 40% will be going to mod authors now, so 25% to Bethesda and 75% to modders if they keep the same rates.

Imagine how many new quality mods can be created if modders can actually pay for assets, professional voice actors and the like. And devote all their time to modding instead of treating it as an occasional evening hobby.

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Digital distribution is becoming cheaper in recent years. A lot more companies jump the bandwaggon with their own launchers this generation.

At the end of the day, for me personally, the question becomes: How many login accounts do I want to manage, and which service is best/which ones to avoid.

For the former, I really hope we see a larger adoption for oauth there, would really reduce the need for password safes for me. Smaller more individual storefronts might be the first to adapt this.

For the latter, the service should offer fast downloads, easy installation, little performance hogging and be trustworthy enough, to take care of my games for decades.

That last point is where gog wins by a landslide. They go out of their way to make old dos games available and functional with an easy installer (personally don't even care about those, but it tells me: We keep your games running), make sure games run on a wide selection of OSs (atm for me most importantly: All versions of Windows, though it's nice to have options), and the final bit of trustworthiness comes from the ability to backup the installers.

Some of these points are only enabled by the removal of DRM. With the advent of Win10, we saw, that support for certain forms of DRM (removal of securom support in win 10; can't even install your old cd-rom games any more) can end at any time. A digital storefront and download server can face the same fate (we've seen it with sites like gamespy, ign-vault and recently another modding hub, it can happen to commercial storefronts, too). Especially if my prediction, that we will see a lot of smaller storefronts in the future will prove true.

So yeah, gog rightfully is the current everybodies-darling. The argument that 'if everyone sticks to steam it enhances competition' doesn't even make sense. I don't just want competition among developers, I also want it among storefronts. I see how having a separate storefront for each game (extreme case) defeats the whole purpose, but what can you do? Personally I own games on steam and gog (and two tablet games on the microsoft store, one on google). Not on Origin or UPlay. And I also don't buy games that require two logins/ cross-site login when bought on steam. That's just stupid. So yeah, I try to use some moderation. while I want competition I also don't want to hunt games on the internet. I was glad steam killed patch hunting, no desire to go back (or switch to larger prey so to speak).

The truth is, that today we have more games available and running than ever, and it's not going to become less. There may be stupid ideas and services coming, but it looks highly likely that the good (pun?) ones will prevail.

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Some of these points are only enabled by the removal of DRM. With the advent of Win10, we saw, that support for certain forms of DRM (removal of securom support in win 10; can't even install your old cd-rom games any more) can end at any time.

Yeekh! Another reason for not going to Win 10. Looks like there is a workaround though.
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You won't hear me complain though. It's the reason I finally got a gog account, after pondering whether to download that black and white crack+patch from a shady looking Russian website that (the website design and probably security holes) looked like it hasn't been updated in 15 years. Just to get the game installed on my girlfriends PC. or alternatively just get it digitally, fully patched. it was on win 8.1, but then again, we didn't have an external disc drive and the image I made on my rig wouldn't load.

Getting the game in one nice downloader was worth the 5 bucks.

Having a faster way to install the game was worth the 5 bucks.

Knowing that MS will no longer support the crapware that is securom, that brought us into that trouble: Totally worth it.

You'll find little securom software nowadays, that doesn't require all sorts of shady downloads to run, anyway. So therefor, I don't actually see the loss with losing the support. Even if you have the disc, you are better off with a crack or gog, then with the original installer. Need to hunt that old patches, might as well just go hunt the whole game (you own it anyways).

The fact that the move (including removed support for dvd drm with the removal of the media suite) is also a big middle finger to the movie industry, that continues to want to squeeze out more money by offering optical disk at a premium and way before any other distribution channel, while also regularly forcing new drm on us (which require new set-top boxes or costly version upgrades of power dvd), is just icing on the cake. You could argue that MS boycotted that long ago with the refusal to add all sorts of bluray drm into their suite, and thus being guilty of locking us out of our own blurays. but I fail to blame them for the fact I can't play 3d blurays on my PC without paying another 100 bucks for the software (the price of the required version of power dvd or a full blown bluray player, both of which would require replacement in a few years due to newer drm). No, the people that wanted to add the drm in the first place are to blame, and look where it lead them to: Dvds are still the most sold medium. Now they want to introduce 4k blurays with even better protection. So, removing drm codecs for their best sold product (dvd) and refusing to implement new ones by MS is something I see as a big 'if you want to sell your stupid discs, but keep a tight control on your content, too, you're now on your own. Write your own goddamn drm software if you want and see how much people care.' towards to movie industry.

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Even better bang for 5 bucks if they can chunk the downloads for those of us with dodgy gear/connections. Or worse comes to worse an option to snail out the content on non drm media. :)

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Bethesda has not indicated any desire to turn their launcher into a storefront yet, but if they do, I wholeheartedly support that as long as they keep it the way it works now with no online requirement. Legends is due to release soon, so I guess we'll just have to see how they handle that.

 

The Bethesda.net Launcher will probably look a lot like the Battle.net Launcher in the end.

 

The next game you'll see on the launcher will likely be Elder Scrolls: Legends, but I imagine they have plans to add their entire catalog, including DOOM, Dishonored 2, and Elder Scrolls Online.

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Yes, I would expect ESO to get pulled in, but who wouldn't? It already has a launcher. One that looks orders of magnitude better than the one Bethesda cooked up :P

 

Though, honestly, I think they should keep ESO apart as it's infrastructure is entirely different from pretty much everything else they'd want to put in.

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Yes, I would expect ESO to get pulled in, but who wouldn't? It already has a launcher. One that looks orders of magnitude better than the one Bethesda cooked up :P

 

Though, honestly, I think they should keep ESO apart as it's infrastructure is entirely different from pretty much everything else they'd want to put in.

 

If you read Blizzard's Battle.net Desktop Application FAQs, it reads: "The Battle.net app replaces our previous game launchers. The app will also act as your gateway to future Blizzard games."

 

So, replacing ESO's launcher wouldn't be far-fetched. Single sign-on is important because it eliminates the need to build a unique launcher for every game, freeing up resources across the board.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 4 weeks later...
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  • 4 months later...

For some weird reason, SSE the game doesn't not appear on the list in the Launcher any more. The Creation Kit does- and launches well enough. 

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SSE should never have been on that launcher though. It's a Steam title.

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1 hour ago, Arthmoor said:

SSE should never have been on that launcher though. It's a Steam title.

Wait a minute.  What are you talking about?

I was under the impression that Bethesda.net launcher was for SSE and FO4, at least in the beginning due for hosting mods on Bethesda.net.

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No. The Bethesda.net launcher has nothing to do with either game. Only the CK's were ever made available there as that's the only way you can get them. Both games have only ever been accessible via Steam. They are not set up through any other system.

TES Legends, Fallout Shelter, and Quake Champions are currently the only actual games hooked up to it.

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  • 2 months later...

That's it.  Bethesda.net have gone too far this time, because this morning I got an e-mail about a password request I did not make and now when I try to login I can't login.

So, I am gonna to abandon Bethesda.net for good and my mods there, especially the mods for PS4 and XB1 are no longer supported or to be updated.   Also, Nexus is the only site I will offer support for the PC version.

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There's some weird stuff going on with the S/W as seen on the feedback thread. Even the old bethsoft forums were 503 for a while. No issue with the logon here- but something has changed, since I have remained logged on for two days running. :o

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