Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 Uninstalled Itself?

[DarthQuietus]

Booted up the sim on Steam just then for a nice morning flight and found myself with a 100+ Gb update. I thought that's odd, until I found myself with a lot more extra storage space.

Turns out my game randomly uninstalled itself?

I'm 100% sure I didn't uninstall the game or delete the game files. Just wondering if this has happened to anyone else?

[Oz Gaming]

Did you verify your Steam launcher ? doing that can cause a complete re-install.

[DarthQuietus]

Ahhh I did because I was having major issues with a couple of the aircrafts since the last patch. I've never had a game fully reinstall from verifying game cache though!

[ScorpiusClaw]

I woke up this morning to find myself in the same situation! Having to redownload 100+Gb. The flightsim is a total waste of space, time and money!!

[Olden Sloe]

Happened to me a few weeks ago. I suspect my original installation file structure got messed up so the reinstall was triggered somehow. IMO too many ways to mess up installation of sim via the continued location choices presented by each patch of purchase. Not a programmer but it would seem that the Devs could make some of the choices automatically thereby avoiding errors?

[ZzozZ]

Happened to me too... So now if you verifiy that game on Steam,you have to re-install 110Gb. Funny thing!!! I did that 3 times...

[Plastik20xx]

Any Steam game that has it's own launcher usually does this, I learned that the hard way with another game. If it has a launcher, do not verify.........or look for a verify option in the launcher itself. :P

[ZzozZ]

good to know!

[Plastik20xx]

And an unfortunate tough lesson for people with data caps. You'd think Valve would protect against this by now.........I had the problem about five years ago with Elder Scrolls Online.

[DarthQuietus]

Luckily I don't have data cap anymore, but lost a good full day of simming ahah.
I have verified games with other launchers before, but this was a first.

Lesson learned for sure XD

[Phos]

Is it possible tha tif you verify the files ONCE, that the games uninstalls itself more than that one time? My dad had to reinstall this game for the 3rd time and only verified the files once.

[DarthQuietus]

Ohh.. I sure hope not! It's a pretty hefty download

[MekStark]

happened to me less than hour ago: Steam's verify game files -> poof! now need to spend several hours reinstalling.

DO NOT USE STEAM'S VERIFY GAME FILES OPTION it WILL force reinstall

[Summer]

Happened to me too. Very annoying for the bandwidth used (like a lot of peeps, I have a monthly cap) and the time wasted reinstalling.

Apart from NOT using the steam verification, the next best thing to do is once you get it downloaded, make a copy of the installation folder somewhere (like on another drive) and call it BACKUP (or whatever). That's the folder that has the "Official" and "Community" folders within.

Then, if it does erased/uninstall your game data again, you can just copy your installation folder back over without having to re-download 100+ GB. At least, that's the theory!