Bethesda And Microsoft Tag Team To Nuke Fallout 76 NDA Breaker

When you sign up for the beta on a highly anticipated video game, playing said game comes with a litany of embargos and non-disclosure agreements. If you sign those agreements, and then turn around and break them, bad things can happen. An Xbox One gamer who was participating in the beta for Bethesda's Fallout 76 learned this lesson the hard way. To gain access to the beta, all payers had to click to agree to an NDA that prevented them from taking photos, video, or allowing someone else to watch them play the game.

The player participated in the beta last Saturday and tried to become famous by recording and posting a 90-second video of gameplay footage to Twitter; a clear violation of the NDA. This player probably thought nothing would happen, but something did happen. Bethesda and Microsoft went full thermonuclear and destroyed the leaker. The story was retold on Reddit by a friend of the offender. The leaker didn’t do much to protect himself from the Bethesda sleuths; the leaker was caught because during the video posted to Twitter the player clicked on the username of the Reddit friend telling the story to invite him to the stress test, displaying the offender's username.

Once the username was known, hellfire rained down upon him. The leaker's Twitter and Xbox Live accounts were taken down, and Bethesda advised the gamer via email that he was banned from the stress test and the beta for Fallout 76 until October 25. According to the friend of this leaker on Reddit, the Twitter account was reopened after appealing to Bethesda via email, but his beta ban remains in place. To make matters worse, Microsoft piled on its punishment in the form of bans on his Xbox Gold, Game Pass, and Xbox Insider accounts that prevents any of them from being used until January 1. That effectively means the leaker can’t play the game once it launches on the Xbox since Fallout 76 is online only and you need Xbox Live to play.