New Final Fantasy IX update accidentally deletes the game

Today Square Enix made a ridiculous slip-up by launching an update for Final Fantasy IX on PC that pretty much deleted most of the game's files.

The update went live earlier this morning on Steam. Anyone who downloaded it got a nasty surprise: Their on-disk files were pretty much wiped out. Gamers downloaded patch data that pretty much removed the data on their hard drives. This SteamDB patch notes catalog gives a rundown of what files were yanked.

At the time of writing the game has been fully restored so there's no worry about updating, but always be sure to back up your lengthy save files or just set auto-updates on pause. Losing hundreds of hours of Final Fantasy save data is a crippling blow--and the world is full of enough of those already.