Square Enix Accidentally Deleted Final Fantasy IX on Steam

Whoops! There’s a good chance this will be fixed ASAP, but April 2, 2020 started with some tomfoolery in the world of Final Fantasy. Square Enix pushed an update to Final Fantasy IX on Steam this morning, the details of which were publicly available thanks to the Steam Database website. There were no official patch notes, and that’s likely because this update was either a mistake altogether, or the result of some unfortunate human error. Either way, if you look at the file changes, you’ll see that Final Fantasy IX was, well, entirely deleted.

Naturally, everyone noticed right away, especially since there are plenty of people just trying to play the game. Everything but the launcher was deleted, and if you take a look at the community forum for Final Fantasy IX on Steam, you can see the fallout. It’s a real mess, but the cool part is you can check out a public record of Square Enix’s team trying to fix it. Within a half hour of the game getting inadvertently nuked, fans were tracing backend activity, thanks to Steam DB’s tracking tools.

There’s a good chance this article will be a bit out of date soon, and we’ll update when it is, but it’s a fascinating reminder that ultimately, video games are software and databases and platforms like Steam are just as susceptible to random problems as anywhere or anything else. Perhaps there’s a real update on the way as well, so if you’re hankering to play some Final Fantasy IX on Steam, keep your eyes peeled in case Square Enix’s original plan was to make a few improvements, such as recent updates for Final Fantasy III.

Final Fantasy IX’s contemporary port is available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and mobile devices. Presumably, it will be available on Steam again sooner, rather than later. You can also snag the PSOne Classic original for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita.