“Ultimate Sega Quality”: $50 For PSO2 HDD Wipes

Sega has come under massive fire after it somehow released an update to the PC edition of Phantasy Star Online 2 which began wiping user hard drives, adding insult to injury by offering $50 of coupons to those whose computers and precious data now lie in ruins.

According to users, with the most recent update the game’s launcher began randomly deleting unrelated folders from their PCs, with some complaining that the launcher took it upon itself to free up tens of gigabytes of space by deleting all and sundry.

With reports of the updater freely deleting its way through such sensitive locations as “Documents and Settings,” “Program Files” and naturally Windows itself, players are understandably aghast at an awe-inspiring level of incompetence from Sega’s coders, along with what must have been a less than exhaustive testing regime.

Sega’s moderately speedy response to the disaster has been to apologise and offer 5,000 yen of coupons or 10,000AC of game currency, as well as asking customers who suffered troubling data loss to contact them with details of their plight for what will presumably be some additional grovelling.

Meanwhile others cannot help but notice how well this plays into the hands of Square Enix and its recent and by most accounts highly successful relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV…