A Steam Error Is Removing Games From Players' Libraries

Every Tuesday afternoon, Steam carries out scheduled maintenance on its systems, sometimes causing outages while in progress. This week, after maintenance was completed, players found that some games in their library that had already been bought were showing a "purchase" button instead of "play." Even if the player tried to purchase it again, it would cause an error saying the content was already in their library--rendering the games unable to be played.

The bug is described in a Resetera thread, with a number of reports showing up on the Steam subreddit. Dead By Daylight seems to be adversely affected, as well as Bethesda games--with one player describing issues with Fallout: New Vegas, and another saying that all Bethesda games in their library had been affected. One Reddit user has said that the issue is affecting all games in their library that are currently on sale on Steam. This checks out with Dead By Daylight, which is currently 60% off in the Steam store, while Bethesda is also having a sale on most of its content.

The Dead By Daylight Twitter account has put out a notice about the issue, though it appears to be an issue on Steam's side.

Players found a workaround that appears to work for most users--the fix requires users to delete their Download Cache in settings and then restart Steam.

Steam has put out an announcement that the bug has now been fixed, and that players should restart the client if it's still occurring.