Fans of most underrated game in the series, but it has received a significant number of ports from Square Enix, including the one that brought it to Steam years ago and a more recent port that have also made it playable on Nintendo Switch.
Steam has been dealing with an increased demand from its s that has directly affected how the digital distribution service approaches game updates, which is why s mostly woke up to the news on the update rather than seeing it as it happened. The Steam in attempting to lessen the load on bandwidth speeds with so many people stuck indoors and looking to video games for escape.
Those looking to Final Fantasy 9 on Steam earlier today were met with an unfortunate surprise, however - an update that had gone live had somehow managed to remove the entire game from the service. Fans attempting to the game during this update were met with requests of 9 MB of disk space and instant s, the latter of which would be nice given current speeds but obviously indicated a serious problem. The problem persisted for hours, but Square Enix pushed another update live quickly and corrected it, proving both that this wasn't an elaborate and ill-timed April Fool's joke and that the developer has its ear to the ground when it comes to community concerns.
More interesting than the fact it happened at all is how exactly an update was pushed live that completely removed a game from the Steam store's digital distribution service. It's also another example of just how fragile digitally ed property can be - there have been instances in the past of licenses expiring and rendering games unplayable for people who had purchased them previously, and for a brief few hours, it looked like the same might be happening for Final Fantasy 9 on Steam.
If nothing else, the incident also shows just how taken for granted smooth updates are by consumers. Fans have complained about plenty of bad updates before, but in context, at least most of those didn't completely remove the game from a service. Maybe in the future the Final Fantasy 9 Steam removal incident can be referenced as one of the worst - and thankfully, extremely brief - updates in modern gaming.
Final Fantasy 9 is available once again on Steam.
Source: Steam
