Bethesda distributed a patch via Steam last night for PC owners of the game with very little fanfare. Weighing in at roughly 18mb, the patch was released sans notes.
It wasn’t long before players figured out what the patch did, however, and the revelation wasn’t a cause for celebration. Apparently, what the patch does is tie the game’s executable into Valve’s Steamworks, a change which now makes it impossible for players to apply the large address aware third party patch that removed the memory usage limit for computers running more than 2GB of memory.
A workaround to the new patch was swiftly released, however. So get that here.
There’s little explanation for why Bethesda would care so much about releasing a patch that only increases the security of its executable, especially considering the fact that Skyrim lacks any sort of online functionality.