It’s admittedly rare that I feel gut-wrenching sympathy for a developer that makes a mistake; not due to prescribed lack of empathy but more so due simply to the personal removal I have from their plight. Game development is a wildly difficult job with deadlines hovering everywhere, a plethora of technologies that you’ll need your code to support, and the sheer volume of information out there. The cherry on top is the fact that you fans millions of ravenous fans that are all more than willing to drag you over hot coals if your work doesn’t meet their criteria, and the criteria are fleeting.
Yet technology can be finicky, with millions of bytes of data all capable of being deleted by a singular erroneous click, and that’s just what happened to PC owners of Final Fantasy IX in the latest update. You can almost hear the unlucky developer screaming in terror as they realized what they pushed live.
The update occurred nineteen hours ago, early on April 2nd, and simply removed all of the files that should exist within the Steam folder on your PC. It’s not necessarily simple to fix either; without having an ‘opt-in’ patch list in Steam preferences for the title, as RimWorld and a few other games have developed, you can’t undo the patch either. There is currently no fix that will allow you to play the title through Steam if you own the content.
https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1245695251764908033
It’s yet another unfortunate strike against digital ownership that many have begun to question, where they previously took it as a simple factor of convenience in the modern era. As PC gamers are noticing a surprising influx of issues that can occur revolving around the idea and execution of digital ownership, many are beginning to look to Steam to develop a method that simply stops the myriad of headaches from occurring.
From SiN being completely removed from everyone’s library after a generally unknown studio purchased the rights to it, to Grand Theft Auto titles being unceremoniously removed and neutered with no warning, it’s starting to feel uncomfortably like we have no control over the games that we’ve spent thousands of dollars on; billions on an international scale.
Yet where should the blame be rested for the consistent issuers that have been occurring recently?
While the developers must own up to the issues that have begun recently plaguing the Steam platform, it’s a question of where we specifically lay the blame. We can place it at the feet of the developers removing their own content after we purchase it, or altering the content resulting in a title that is frankly worse for it, yet with that comes unique problems. If the developer is offering a patch for the sake of balancing, and players opt to maintain the current patch, then you have balancing issues; this wouldn’t be a problem with single-player games, per se, but multiplayer games, or titles that you can bring your single-player save into a multiplayer aspect, would suffer.
Maybe Steam should do something to protect consumers with that delicious 30% cut they take?
