In a blog post made earlier today, Bethesda — home of everything from Elder Scrolls to Wolfenstein — announced plans to “sunset the forums on Bethesda.net”. Or, in more precise terms, shut them down.
“When the forums first started on Bethsoft.com, they were a great place for everyone to discuss amazing games, share stories, and come together with similar interests”, the post reads. “The forums have seen many changes over the years, and we’ve enjoyed seeing our community grow and evolve alongside Bethesda and all of our games. Now, though, with the numerous ways people are communicating, we feel the time is right to move away from the forums and chat with you where you prefer to be.”
So starting May 24, Bethesda will begin closing their forums, first by restricting access to new posts, then on July 6 beginning the process of actually shutting them down completely and scrubbing them from the internet, warning users “you will have 30 days to save any post contents you wish to keep once the forums are closed.”
It’s not that Bethesda is ending support, it’s simply moving it. “We will be moving our conversations from the Bethesda.net forums to our official Discord Servers”, the post says, while they’ll also continue to participate in an official capacity in Reddit discussions.
Which, fine, if your job is talking about engagement metrics and active discussions, or if you’re the kind of Bethesda user who is down for constant, active community stuff, then that’s all great!
But for anyone like me, who finds official forums a priceless asset when I’m google searching “am i the only person on earth with this game-crashing bug” or “whats up with this very strange quest”, it sucks! From tech support to gameplay questions, official forums have always been more valuable to loads of people as an archive rather than a community, and to see them transition almost exclusively to the latter is a big disappointment, especially seeing as it’s something of a trend (BioWare did something similar a few years back).
(A quick note that Elder Scrolls Online fans are unaffected by this, as their forum is run separately to the wider Bethesda community).
Leave a Reply