Fallout 76 Will Not be Available on Steam

Here's a pop quiz for ya: has Bethesda confirmed Fallout 76 for Steam? The Answer: they haven't. And now, they've confirmed that the highly anticipated online RPG will, in fact, be absent from the game distribution service at launch.

First reported by GameSpot, they claimed a Bethesda representative had confirmed with them that Fallout 76 will not be available on Steam at launch, but on the publisher's own game launcher. Anyone who's pre-ordered the game for PC may have noticed that this was the only available option for the platform.

Not long after, company marketing executive Pete Hines made the same confirmation on Twitter. He links the FAQ as a source for the claim. While the page does indeed say it'll be available on the Bethesda launcher, it doesn't specifically state that it will not be available on Steam.

There could be a number of reasons for this decision. As the Bethesda empire grows, they may want to establish their own platform to work from. Though the biggest suspected reason is to avoid the percent cut that Steam would take from all sales.

While this is inconvenient to those accustomed to using Steam as your go-to gaming platform, this should affect the actual game in anything beyond how friends lists are handled. There also remains the possibility that the game will be introduced to Steam post-launch. Fallout Shelter was on the Bethesda Launcher for a while before it eventually was moved onto Steam. Time will tell.

This announcement comes shortly after Epic Games announced a similar decision for Fortnite: Battle Royale for Android phones. This decision was put under much harsher fire than Bethesda's, however, primarily due to the security risks involved in such an idea.

Fallout 76 will release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on November 14.