Players of Ghost Trick on iOS were recently greeted with an ugly surprise. The puzzle-adventure game was completely delisted from the iOS App Store. Now even those who have purchased the game cannot access it. Ghost Trick already cannot be purchased on the App Store, but those who had already done so were at least able to re-download the game.
This came about after Capcom released an update for Ghost Trick meant to fix the playing experience, but after the update produced another game-breaking bug (rendering dysfunctional the IAP system that allows players to progress through chapters) the game was removed from purchase histories altogether, per the TouchArcade article sourced below.
This is the sort of incident that prompts some gamers to take issue with the absence of physical copies for games and the idea of the “all-digital future” as it is sometimes called. It’s one matter for companies and consumers to simply identify what is and isn’t proper handling of a particular product; it’s another matter for such ideas to be executed in a way that treats people fairly.
That being said, the author of the article has since suggested that Capcom is working on rectifying this problem. And in a statement provided to Polygon, Capcom had this to say on Ghost Trick for iOS: “We hope to have the game back up and available for purchase soon. Users who have purchased the game will be able to re-download it once fixes have been made.”
Let’s hope it pans out.
