I haven't used Stadia so I don't know if this is the case already but cloud gaming providers need to give people the ability to download and back up their own data, or better yet just store them locally and online both by default.
When LAN parties were still a thing I and a group of friends once lost an entire day of Titan Quest progress because someone stepped on a power strip and turned everyone's PC off. I'm still so paranoid over this that to this day I always back up savegames to at least one other place.
Seems a terrible idea given how many code execution bugs have been found throughout the years in the "loading a savegame" part of games. You would have an RCE in your hands pretty quickly.
Pretty much every aspect of video games already make them “handle everything with extreme caution”-type software- eg there were RCE bugs in tf2 that could be triggered by a malicious client joining a server, or being able to write whole programs into various pokemon gameboy games just using the right sequence of inputs. I think if I’m not mistaken there was even a case of user picture sprays in source engine games being maliciously crafted.
You may as well plan your security mitigations in such a way that, ultimately, RCE is no more of a big deal than somebody being able to launch notepad.exe or chrome.exe to use a cloud gpu server as a remote desktop.
Now, that’s all to be said unless you’re dealing w somebody who has a GPU-/hypervisor sandbox escape exploit in addition to a RCE sploit they want to plant. In which case ya ur screwed. And I bet there’s serious effort spent by both eg NVIDIA and other cloud gaming providers, but, well, that’s a different beast than untrusted binary savegames
When they remastered Starcraft, to preserve compatibility, they emulated the buffer overrun that many maps were using to directly write data to game memory.
Geforce NOW was best for things like this. They'd let you run VM with Win10 and Steam. So you could easily leverage to admin, download let's say RDR2 from internet and play it on VM, hehe.
There is/was whole market going on, people sold "exploits" for Geforce NOW, so people would play whatever they want.
GDPR section 20 theoretically counts here.[1] I guess the argument would hinge on whether save data counts as a machine representation of the state of the system after a series of user-generated controller inputs. A similar case was when Spotify stopped trying to block automated playlist export after a GDPR complaint.[2]
Seems antithetical to the idea of cloud gaming as a platform. I agree save data should be made available for games that can also be played locally, but my understanding is that cloud can exclusively offer games with completely opaque backends. You don't have players reverse engineering the client, the experience is completely controlled and proprietary. For those games, save data should be kept secret.
Because it's really important for publishers that users can't edit their saves on their single-player-but-always-online-with-insane-amounts-of-grind-and-ingame-microtransactions. Think about the profits!
At the other extreme I love what Stardew Vally does here; saves are cross-platform and in a simple XML format. You can edit it and people even make things like https://upload.farm/ to share games and ideas.
I don't think it'd be a fool-proof mitigation but something I believe would move beyond a single point of failure (which, evidently, savegames alone are) is to hash the saves. You can then upload saves that match either one of your own hashes.
Hopefully, the system would be architectured so that even if the saves themselves went missing the table of hashes is still around.
If the cheat is achievable via a save upload, does it matter? I don't see how someone having a bunch of extra call of duty weapons unlocked hurts anyone else.
I have lost a few save-games, so I can relate. In my case it was because I forgot about them or the fact that, I did care if they were lost (I rarely game at all).
I have an "offline" Windows 7 gaming PC (only connected to a dedicated file-server, that holds the game installers, drivers, etc). I only use this PC to play Witcher 3, Fallout 3/NV, and a few others. I found this PC (i5-2500K) at the side of the curb, and invested ~$21 in 16GB of RAM, and ~$230 in a GTX 1660 Ti (6GB). It runs my games at Ultra settings in 1080p, so I am pretty happy with it.
It has happened that I have lost save-games because I did a reinstall and forgot some save-games because "There is nothing important on this PC!" ...doh...
I then switched to using Duplicati for backing up save games, screenshots and game configs to the dedicated file-server.
I don't bother with that anymore though, because the gaming PC now runs off a FibreChannel SAN backed by ZFS Volumes. So I have snapshot, rollback and clones. Which is also quite useful for testing drivers, and rolling back to "a clean install" or "a clean install + windows updates via WSUS-offline" without waiting for the installer or updates.
Your gaming setup sounds similar to mine, but more sophisticated. I also have an offline win7 gaming PC. Unfortunately many games still require windows, but for some it is possible already to play on Linux. And it is just too much effort for me to keep a windows installation reasonably secure, to prevent games from phoning home. So offline it is.
To install games, I put the game installer (in most cases bought from gog) on a USB storage device. This doesn't happen too often, I don't have as much time for gaming as I would like to.
Like the sibling comment, I too would be interested in more details about your setup
Your current gaming PC setup sounds like what I'd want. Can you give some details about the SAN hardware? What does it take to have Windows boot off of a FibreChannel SAN that's backed by ZFS?
It would be a rather dangerous precedent if they don't care about the save games. On some games, the world / game save file can have hundreds of hours invested into it. If they were just like "well sucks, we might lose it, eh", it'd say something about using stadia.
I can tell you that the stadia team don't look at it like that at all. I've worked on storage, I know their storage system design, and I've discussed it with the SRE team in the past.
I'm not involved in any of the ongoing and wouldn't comment on it. Came here to assert that this team is neither stupid nor callous.
It'd say that Google is not serious about Stadia, long-term. Which was already known when they announced it for the first time, so not a lot of loss there.
This is very likely just a bug they'll fix soon though, at least I certainly hope so for the players' sakes.
Hopefully they just waiting for the support team timezone and it's just a matter of clicking restore on their storage at whatever point in time prior to the erasure
These are paying customers after all, surely they won't go around without backups. Imagine the image damage from something like that.
Yeah that's exactly what I was going to say. Surprised anyone thought Stadia was a good idea (both internally at Google and customers thinking it was worth trusting their hard-earned cash to buy games that only live within the walls of the chocolate factory given Google's long established track record of pulling the rug out whenever people come to rely on them in that fashion).
I don't even use Steam's cloud save feature. Too many stories of game servers or other data servers disappearing over the years. I'd rather rely on myself to backup my saves, even if I'm not that trustworthy of a custodian of this. At least if I lose something it's my fault.
As a bit of a "privacy nut", I'm more careful about what I leave on other people's servers than most people I know, though, so I acknowledge I'm not anywhere near the median on this.
Stadia controllers bundled with a Chromecast are (often) less than the cost of the Chromecast on its own and come with 1 month free. So not exactly a big risk to take.
The risk is not the cost of the controller or the subscription service fee it's the cost of the games which for AAA is $60 a pop. People who bought those games on Stadia will soon have nothing to show for it.
My understanding is subscription services from Microsoft, Sony and Epic give free games every month which you own once you have downloaded them. By contrast Stadia is a subscription which gives you the right to play games on their servers but you have to purchase the games first, and if the servers get switched off (as will soon happen) all you have afterwards is a dead controller and your memories.
I think cloud gaming only takes off when the games are built specifically for this use case.
Right now, streaming gaming consists of encoding GPU output, relaying player inputs, and praying everything in between doesn't notice the player isn't in the same room anymore.
Think about how much compute and memory resources are wasted because we are running thousands of nearly duplicate gaming environments with wildly inconsistent utilization throughout. How much latency and resource consumption could be shaved off if the game was aware of its circumstances and engineered for this purpose?
I’ve generally had a good experience with Xbox cloud gaming. I’ve been playing city skylines on xcloud and decided to try downloading it to my xbox one s since my Bay Area internet keeps going it. Playing the game locally was super laggy and I only lasted a few minutes before deleting the game and playing via xcloud again.
You couldn't save on memory if everyone was using the same textures?
The most hacky but also potentially elegant approach would be to create/modify a game engine such that it can render 4 clients at a time onto the same viewport (i.e. 2x2 1080/720p). Just like the good old days with goldeneye64 multiplayer. With a setup like this, you could take advantage of cost sharing throughout.
Again, would have to build the game from zero to target this path. I think there could be some economic arguments to be made here. The software and creativity are the only real limitations.
You don't need cloud gaming to lose saves, I lost a save once when Origin decided to overwrite my save with a "newer" empty one. Make backups of things you care about
Game industry is notorious for binary blob game state. I worked at many and where possible converted to a keyed/JSON format that can encrypted if needed or keys and it led to more server based and portable profile/game states. These were hard fought battles.
The best part of JSON or keyed data is less profile conversions for one new key that shifts everything by a set position. Keys can be added and removed and you don't break the entire game save.
Binary blobs for game formats/saves/states is still a massive problem in gamedev. They have given many people a bad time when the profile conversion or state conversion fails and you end up with borked states. Almost impossible for that to happen with a keyed format like JSON. Getting studios to use it, especially early in dev to work with server/mobile dev was a massive challenge.
I had started playing Skyrim on an XBOX360. A few years later I got it for my pc as well. I was amazed when I found out I could easily extract the save file form the console and use it on the PC version of Skyrim without any issues! Best part is that I was running Skyrim (and the extraction tools) on Linux under wine (this was before proton even).
"Closed-source" and "industry secrets" are holding gamedev back big time. We get away with many practices that'd be considered backwards by a web developer even 10 years ago, and we have no viable solutions to many gamedev-specific problems. This in turn leads to just the same stuff being re-made again and again since like 2005 or so.
it's a link to a thread of many posts in the Stadia community forum. all of them echoing that they, too, lost their save game data in the game mentioned in the title. some folks said they lost 700+ hours of gameplay.
an (employee?) replied and said it's been escalated.
For a game? Arguably, any "damages" suffered by folks who lost data here would be limited to the amount they paid in order to play the game. You could go even further down that route and say that the game probably provides at least as much entertainment value as seeing a feature film in a theater. Since the average movie ticket cost is somewhere around $10 and the average feature film runs between 75 and 210 minutes (both according to some quick Google searches), you could say the players already got ~$3/hour in value simply from playing already.
Sure, this seems like a silly exercise, but, I could imagine it getting parsed out in a similar manner should the discussion of compensation turn serious.
The player did not lose 600 hours of entertainment, so I don't think that the movie comparison works.
This seems similar to burning your photo album. There might have been an emotional attachment, and a significant non-financial investment, but how do you translate either of those into money? Eye for an eye, maybe?
No, they did not lose 600 hours of entertainment. That's the point. They lost at most what they paid to play the game. They received back 600 hours of entertainment, making their net loss equal to:
My suspicion is that for any reasonable values of the above variables, that loss is going to end up negative for most players. In other words, the appropriate compensation here is zip, zero, nada for most people.
Even if you factor in emotional attachment, for an emotionally healthy individual, the value of a few days feeling like "oh, damn, that really sucked" probably isn't much, either. In fact, I'd say it's probably zero here, too, since most people will just get over it without any help or external cost to themselves.
At least that's what I imagine my lawyer telling me if I called up with a story about how some internet gaming company lost my data. In actual fact, they'd probably just tell me I had no case, then laugh about me after hanging up the phone.
Thats not how games, damages and emotional attachment work. When I was a bit younger I lost a save game of a SNES rpg - and cried. Which I think was completely normal now. So much time and investment just gone, it can be heartbreaking.
Only non-players could take the position that game time just vanishes, with some enjoyment happening during the experience. That is true, but only for the most basic arcade games of the past.
I think there are two different things being described between you and the parent comment - One is the value of the emotional damage and possible importance of the data, and the other is how compensation is likely to be practically calculated by a court (i.e. if you paid £30 for the game, played it for 100 hours, and then lost game-save data but could still play the game, it is unlikely that a court would assign compensation in reality, particularly compensation above and beyond the retail price).
You used GBP so I assume you are from UK; I think that UK and US jurisprudence differ a lot here. In UK compensations almost always only cover provable financial loss (unless there is explicit statute saying otherwise, for example injuries), while US is more willing to assign value to emotional damage and inflict punitive compensation.
I'm having a hard time trying to tell if this comment is sarcastic or not, so at the risk of Poeing myself, of course they wouldn't pay them 10k dollars. The client has lost nothing. They still got the gameplay hours. They still have those experiences. In a very real legal sense they don't need anything to be made whole. They paid for the right to play a game. They played the game. They can continue to play the game. There is no monetary value they need to be compensated. At an absolute worst case scenario the devs can twiddle some bits and add levels and xp to new profiles for the player, but that would be in the realm of 'being nice' and not 'was sued into doing it'.
Legally that's a very similar argument, yes. You act like that's some sort of 'gotcha' but that's actually a perfect example. I'd be hard pressed to find precedent for any award that wasn't limited to the cost of the film.
Right, I wasn't talking about legally enforceable damages. My point was about how valuable the data is to the user: If they offered $50 to the user, would the user feel satisfied? I doubt it after 600 hours of gameplay. $1,000? $10,000? The numbers are much too high for the company to pay - that's just a dramatization of one sense in which the data is irreplaceable.
As far as actual enforceability, if the agreement between the user and company includes a clause saying they company will preserve the user's data, or if there is a legal or technical requirement for the user to store their data with the company, maybe the user would have a claim. But I doubt there is much precedent for calculating damages.
Because losing a save can be an emotional event with feelings of loss higher than loss of physical goods depending on what was in it.
I'd expect even long heavily customizable RPGs to top out at 150 hours of actual feelings of lost progress, but that's still a considerable sum. I don't think courts would want to try valuing that though due to how such a precedent could be abused.
If you tried to argue emotional damages over a lost save game in terms of compensation I'd say you were proceeding pro se at that point, because no lawyer is going to risk the court sanctions and harm to their professional reputation.
They lost that they probably won't be able to experience the game play of a 70+ level character anymore unless they want to invest another 600 hours in an unreliable game system. My PS2 game saves from 20 years ago are still there though.
But ultimately, why is that even a question? The still have that 600 hours of playing they've done, nothing can change the past.
What has changed is the future games: to get to the same point the were at they would, presumably, need to play about the same amount of hours.
Maybe if they truly won't be able to restore the data (I expect they will), then perhaps some sort of conversion from hours for "in game" currency could be used, where the currency could be used for buing items or others stuff (map visibility?) applicable to the game.
I haven't played Ghost Recon, though, so I don't know this is at all a realistic solution to the game.. and it would be relatively big effort to make this system for just this (hopefully) single-time situation.
This is what can and will happen if we decide it’s a good idea to rent games instead of owning them. Same with always online games - at some point the developers can and will shutdown the servers, rendering your game unplayable. It already happened several times. I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche.
I hear this, and I respect it, but I'll offer a different perspective:
Media is transient, it's ephemera. We will remember the big names but forget the small things. There's more media being produced than I could consume in a lifetime, so if something disappears I can move on to the next thing.
I find that experiencing media in the moment is part of the allure - this is something happening now and it's something I'm interested in now.
That's not to say we shouldn't have archives and history, but letting go of my collection has been a huge weight off my back.
I don't get this kind of callous, tough-love, blow-up-your-memories sell.
There's nothing about any of this that looks like a ticking time bomb. Everything was fine until one day some part of the world around us unceremoniously disappeared, for no real ascertainable reason, in a way totally beyond most peoples control.
This is shit. Unqualifiedly just shit.
Good for you that you feel free & clear for casting off the past, but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have, for no real reason, self-destructed.
> It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.
I went and played some turns of Civilization that I haven't touched in half a decade a couple weeks ago. Every couple years I like to play a couple matches of Mechwarrior 2. These things don't self destruct. They harken from an age before online services, when personal computers let us manage & operate our own systems, let us backup our saves & our games.
> Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
> I went and played some turns of Civilization that I haven't touched in half a decade a couple weeks ago. Every couple years I like to play a couple matches of Mechwarrior 2. These things don't self destruct. They harken from an age before online services, when personal computers let us manage & operate our own systems, let us backup our saves & our games.
It takes time.
> In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
It doesn't explode unexpectedly. It explodes in a way that the creator made it explode. So, yeah, it seems that you are the mean one here.
Your insistence & persistence in both being cruel to consumers & also personally insulting me at the same time is remarkable.
There's been a pretty fair & reasonable deal in computing for decades. Preservation is getting harder, worse, impossible. This is- pretty clearly to most of us- a loss.
> Your insistence & persistence in both being cruel to consumers & also personally insulting me at the same time is remarkable.
As far as I can see the only think I'm saying here is that creators should be able to create things as they see fit. I did not say a word about consumers or what they should be doing. I would love to know what gives you the impression that I'm being cruel to consumers here.
You did insult me first, why are you surprised that I would defend myself? You are even doing it in this post to.
>creators should be able to create things as they see fit
So you support the abolition of copyright law? That would certainly go a long way toward solving the problem of media self-destructing within human timescales. But if creators get to benefit from government granted monopolies, it's only fair that we introduce some consumer-protection law too. Copyright was intended to benefit both consumers and producers. Deliberate destruction of media is a sign that it's drifted too far in the producers' favor.
When I wrote "creators should be able to create things as they see fit" I wasn't really thinking that as allowing them to ignore laws, like safety and such.
As for my opinion on copyright laws, I guess I'd be for their abolition. But that is just my opinion that isn't really based on any real knowledge of these laws or what consequences they have/removing them would have.
> But if creators get to benefit from government granted monopolies, it's only fair that we introduce some consumer-protection law too.
Very rarely is "exploding" part of the artistic intent. More likely it's something the auteur was never consulted on and the publisher didn't care enough to avoid.
> It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.
True. The Parthenon, the work of classical authors and philosophers. Michelangelo’s David. The work of musicians, artists, architects and authors from bygone eras. They all fade and disappear without the tireless effort of conservationists and historians everywhere.
And thank goodness for their work. Its an indictment of our modern technology landscape how much tomorrow’s historians will be missing. Perfect digital copies are trivially easy to make, but that doesn’t seem to help. Is it possible to run old iOS apps? Play old Xbox or PlayStation games after Microsoft and Sony shut down their old online services? Install and run old copies of adobe products? See what GMail looked like when it launched? Or play earlier versions of multiplayer games like WoW or EverQuest? No. In a few years it will all be gone, rendered inoperable, “upgraded” or purged.
The work of pirates, software crackers and emulators has kept some of what we had in the 90s alive. But so much software we have today has been intentionally artificially made to be ephemeral. Chess has survived for thousands of years. How long will DoTA, Diablo3 or Hearthstone be playable? These games will be lucky to survive a generation.
What an inhumane way to treat a creator’s life’s work. What callous disregard we hold for the curiosity of tomorrow.
> It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.
Not, statistically, on a meaningful time scale. All my data will probably one day be gone... But I have enough backups and replicas and remote repos that it's unlikely to happen before my own death.
> It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.
Yeah, but on what timescale?
Saying it's justified for software to break as soon as the company dies because it would be destroyed on it's own anyway is like saying "we all die anyway so we might as well be slaughtered".
You consider media to be something that is "consumed" once and then forgotten about, like food. That's fine, it's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but please don't imply that others should think the same way or that it in any way justifies situations like these. New media doesn't just replace old media unless you see it as nothing but a mindless waste of time.
While I understand the sentiment, as someone with both an unusual music and film taste, doing what you think I should do would probably mean a lot of what I like would be lost forever, and it would be a shame.
Medianis ephemeral, but art very often not so much. If someone decided to throw the works of Bach or Beethoven away we would have truly lost something for example.
Of course not everything is art to everybody, not everything has value to everybody but there are things truely worth of preserving — and often for other reasons than we ontuitively would think.
I think that's only fair if you have paid for the content in a way that is intended to be transient (like a theatre show, concert, etc). But when you pay for content in a way that is intended to be frequently played back (like a CD, book or computer game) then I think there is a fair expectation that content is persistent. This whole shift to "you license content, not own it" is a modern trend that has left many feeling cheated because it gives the illusion of persistence while giving the service providers complete control to remove your access at any time they wish.
That's good for you, if you can pull it off. It's unreasonable to expect others to do the same. And as a technological justification for something that ostensibly exists to serve users, it would be inexcusable.
However, I don't think it justifies the artificial loss that happens with renting software. There is no logical reason why would a program stop working on my computer if my computer has not changed. Software on my computer must not depend on any third-party-anything.
Of course, that computer will break one day, and the software will stop working on it eventually. But it will happen when it is natural to happen - not when some CEO decides to pull the plug.
Most of it is crap though. The amount of high quality media is actually lacking. A lot of good mobile games are just ports from a different platform. If you were to wipe all mobile games every five years the overall quality would go down.
"I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche."
Same here, I gave up on some AAA games because of this reason. I frequently return to old games. Some of them are from 1997,some of them are 2000,some of them are 2010's. Most of them have patches but if stadia and likes become mainstream, I don't know how its going to end up in 20 years.
a "nice" feature of consoles like the Nintendo Switch is that they can always be played offline, even the ones that are "always online" on other consoles and computers.
There's a lot of issues with the switch - and Steam Deck is expensive, but maybe if it sells really well, other companies will make similar offerings and we might get some actual competition in "consoles" or handhelds that can play games up to about 6 years prior to the release of the console, perfectly.
I imagine with the shrinking of transistors and whatnot, someone could theoretically release an extremely low power version of, say, a 9800GT, or even a 1050ti in a couple of years - Rather than needing all this active cooling and heatpipes and a huge PCB to spread out the RAM and everything, just put the same IP onto a 5nm process or something and get the same performance in 1/10th of the wattage.
I have a "gaming laptop" that is in its own rights a powerful and capable machine.
However I have found myself preferring to use geforce now for game streaming from a Chromebook. It is much more convenient to pull out a small light and cheap Chromebook and start playing a new game immediately (no downloads) than to get out the heavy, bulky gaming laptop, wait for it to boot, plug it in, apply Windows updates etc, download and install new game/patches/steam updates/etc, hear the multiple fans whirring like crazy and feel the heat and so on and so on.
I love the game streaming from a Chromebook because you are up and running in seconds. I started doing this after I had my first kid and realised that I had small windows of opportunity - perhaps 15-20 mins - to do something "for me" and I didn't want to waste that waiting for a patch to download it whatever. With Chromebook and streaming (I use stadia too, but less so as the catalogue is poor) I can go from a closed laptop to in-game in like 20-30 seconds.
We already have the save games synced to Steam, so nothing is really changing in terms of data location (at least for geforce now - stadia is different as you cannot use steam, which was a product-killing mistake for stadia in my opinion)
The only thing that I personally miss is that I am not able to poke around the game data files - many a happy hour lost decompiling Unity-based C# code or spelunking through data files with a hex editor (sometimes more fun than the game itself!)
this is fear mongering. this has nothing to do with renting. many multiplayer games for decades have had your data saved server side only. ghost recon breakpoint is online only on all platforms. this has nothing to do with gaming as a service
I don't disagree but owning games isn't a solution to this problem. I've had gameboy batteries die and wipe the cart, I've had saves corrupted, it just happens.
We're not in the age of carts with batteries anymore, though. That was a technical limitation that doesn't exist anymore, and it's in no way comparable to this. If you own and control the game in such a way that you can access its saves and copy them elsewhere (which applies to almost every PC game that isn't live service garbage), you can pretty much ensure that losing them is impossible. This is basically a case of taking a solved problem and un-solving it.
And keep in mind that when people say "owning a game" in this context it doesn't necessarily mean having the game in its original (physical) format, if you have a ROM of a gameboy game on your PC and play it via an emulator, in some ways you "own" the game more than if you had it as a physical copy because you can ensure the permanent preservation of both the game and its saves, unlike with the physical version.
I love stadia but it’s been on my mind that it may be dead for a while now. I guess I’d just buy a pixel with the refund they give me if it’s Google credit
Not too long ago Microsoft closed their ebook platform. The books all had DRM so would stop working when Microsoft shutdown it’s servers. They gave everyone a full refund for all their books I think.
How many times does stuff like this have to happen before people stop trusting the cloud (i.e., someone else's computer) as the only place where data they care about lives?
> How many times does stuff like this have to happen before people stop trusting the cloud (i.e., someone else's computer) as the only place where data they care about lives?
Most of the people don't have viable alternatives to this.
And yet, almost all of my IRL friends don't do backups. They don't care, or don't have the time/knowledge for redundancy of their data. So, for most of them, using Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever is going to be a far more reliable way of storing their data, seeing as very few people get banned from these platforms and lose everything.
I am yet to meet someone else in person who has their own Nextcloud or ownCloud instance running. Even if they cared to do that, once again, for the majority of average people out there working with servers is out of the question, somehow everyone knows how to use a smartphone but not how to install Debian on an old PC and run a Docker image (at least without setting a bad password for the database and accidentally exposing it to the world).
I'm not saying don't use the cloud at all. I'm just saying you should keep a local copy in addition to the cloud, and to not use services that don't let you do that. (And if, e.g., your cloud copy is held by Google and your local copy is on a phone with Google Find My Device remote wipe enabled, that doesn't count as two.)
I would be inclined to trust cloud based solutions in terms of data retention. What I don't trust is whether I'll have continued access to said data. Google specifically has a pretty heinous track record when it comes to account suspensions.
I think it's significantly more likely that these people's game saves will be restored than if their local saves were lost. People are woefully uninformed, and often quite lazy, about backup strategies, especially if they play games on consoles. When you use a cloud service backups and restore becomes someone else's problem that they're paid to do well.
The main problem for these people will be whether Google and Ubisoft consider it a big enough problem to bother fixing.
> The main problem for these people will be whether Google and Ubisoft consider it a big enough problem to bother fixing.
It's this lack of control that keeps me gaming locally and saving games locally.
My save game backup strategy is mostly non-existent, I focus on just things I create like code or writing or pictures or videos. I've lost saves before through my own stupidity and I'll curse the gods for a few minutes and start a new character or whatever or decide it's a great time to try a new game. If some company decides my lost save is not worth retrieving or I get banned for who knows what reason or they just turn off the servers one day, that's when I'll feel the pain for a long time and curse them for a lot longer than I would curse the gods or myself.
This discussion so high up at HN while the issue is non-significant compared to the events in the real world right now (mass shooting in the US, war in europe) makes me sad and happy at the same time. Sad because people seem to lose touch with reality, happy because apparently a lot of people get mad about this which means the don’t have generally speaking not a lot of other issues in their life ;-).
Why is a mass shooting in the US a significant event in the real world? If you rank significance by the people impacted, you could care about the estimated million children who get trafficked each year[0]. I'd even argue that gun violence in the US is just a wedge issue[1] to drive views to news websites and stations, and to keep folks occupied, so they won't rock the boat too much.
If you have spend 700+ hours on this game, as some people in the comments say they have, then this is defiantly not an non-significant issue compared to something "current issue" that takes place on the other side of the planet and will be replaced with a new "current issue" next month or tomorrow. It is all about perspective.
Other people spend hundreds of hours on visiting completely static places (stuffed with other observers), eating food there and some unremarkable social/physical activity. Nobody says “it’s so sad you traveled to <popularlocation>”.
When LAN parties were still a thing I and a group of friends once lost an entire day of Titan Quest progress because someone stepped on a power strip and turned everyone's PC off. I'm still so paranoid over this that to this day I always back up savegames to at least one other place.
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