GTA Disappeared And The Internet Was Freaking Out
The Grand Theft Auto series is known for its controversial moments, but a confusing event yesterday may have topped them all in terms of fan confusion. For some reason that remains unclear, GTA 5 and the rest of Rockstar Games' catalogue suddenly vanished from Steam, sending players spiraling.
Over on Twitter, fans were alerted to the whole kerfuffle when Twitter user @RobotBrush posted a screenshot of all of the recently removed Steam pages. In the image, one major Rockstar game after another is noted to have been removed from Steam "at publisher request," insinuating that Rockstar no longer wanted the games in circulation.
"Looks like rockstar just completely f***ed off from steam," RobotBrush tweeted, "all their games are purchase-disabled now."
Fans immediately began to freak out in the replies to RobotBrush's tweet. Some people responded with surprised gifs and utter disbelief. One gamer joked that it was only a matter of time before scalpers started selling hard drives containing Rockstar games for a handsome sum. Another fan hilariously pointed out that although GTA 5 was no longer available to buy on Steam, fans could still purchase Shark Cards flush with in-game currency, because of course those were still available.
Luckily for concerned fans, the Steam snafu was quickly noticed, and Rockstar's games were being mass re-listed within an hour. A baffled RobotBrush updated fans, tweeting, "ok ... seems someone f***ed something up somewhere ... seems like they're slowly coming back." However, the restoration of Rockstar's Steam catalogue came with its own list of weird issues.
As pointed out by TechRaptor, some of the re-listed games were previously unavailable for purchase. This means that games like Max Payne and Midnight Club 2, which had been removed from Steam in the past, were suddenly available to buy, thanks to this mass de-list and re-list. And strangely enough, these games became available in the store before the Steam version of Grand Theft Auto 5 came back. According to Eurogamer, plenty of fans took advantage of this oversight and snagged Midnight Club 2 on the cheap, so this wasn't a total debacle for gamers.
A similar issue occurred on Steam last year, when Square Enix accidentally deleted Final Fantasy 9 from Steam. Unfortunately for FF9 fans, however, a resolution was not found quite as quickly. It's still unclear what initially caused the Great Rockstar De-Listing, but fans can breathe easily knowing that their favorite games are back on Steam.