Original story:

It's the day before Christmas and all through the house, nobody is using Steam, not even a mouse—because, you guessed it, Steam is down.

It's unclear what's going on, but at a little before 2 pm ET on a Wednesday, we're guessing this not routine maintenance. Steam appears to be completely gone: The unofficial Steam Status website is reporting websocket errors, and says the entire Steam store, community, and web API are offline. SteamStat page views are also jumping up, which is a pretty reliable indicator that something's gone wrong.

Downdetector is also indicating some serious issues with Steam, ongoing since a little after 1 pm ET.

P0nchik95 on the Steam subreddit has a theory—I don't know how likely it is to be accurate (not very, I suspect) but it's not terrible advice anyway:

Comment from r/Steam

We've reached out to Valve to see if they've got anything to say about it, and will keep an eye on things in the meantime. Naturally, we will also update when Steam is back.

As Fallout season 2 introduces new fans to New Vegas and continues pulling viewers into the wasteland, we're all side-eying Bethesda over a potential new installment. There's been little mention or movement on Fallout 5, but Game Informer asked some of the prominent devs about their hopes for the Fallout franchise moving forward.

"I would be happy with a game that is as successful as the previous Fallout games that continues to give fans what they love," Emil Pagliarulo, studio design director, states. "To give them a story that they can get into and systems that they love and really just an experience that they play not for 20 hours and not for 100 hours, but an experience they can play for 200, 300, 600 hours, because that's the kind of games we make."

If ever there's a hallmark of Bethesda games, exorbitant playtimes is it. I've sank hundreds of hours into Oblivion for sure, and I'm definitely pushing three figures on several other of the studio's releases. Whatever form Fallout 5 takes, it has a lot to live up to in terms of scope and replayability, because Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4 are mind-bogglingly large.

You can spend dozens of hours exploring and fulfilling side-quests without ever leaning into the main narrative. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I've fully completed the story of any Fallout. I did it once in Oblivion, and it was a concerted effort since I'd already amassed considerable playtime.

Pagliarulo hopes to evolve the series too, with quality-of-life updates dictated by what players don’t know they're missing. "In the Oblivion remaster that came out, people forget in the original Oblivion, you couldn't sprint. So, of course we're going to add that in the Oblivion remaster," he explains.

He finishes in poetic fashion: "The industry moved on, and so, we want to move on with it." It's a good time to be a Fallout fan.

Bethesda lead says in the "time between Fallout 4 and Starfield," the "one thing" the studio has learned is that "there is no one definition of an RPG."