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Nintendo's Promised Cloud Saves On Switch Won't Work For Every Game (arstechnica.com) 34

Posted by BeauHD from the read-the-fine-print dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The first paid online service for Nintendo Switch, simply named Nintendo Switch Online, is set to arrive at some point later this month, and we're still waiting on a few key details. One detail about the service emerged on Friday via Nintendo's official site, and it's not a great one: there will be specific limits to the service's promised cloud-save support. Nintendo Switch Online's $20/year cost includes a promise to "save your data online for easy access" -- which, for the uninitiated, will be the only way to back up your Switch games' save data when it launches. Currently, should your Nintendo Switch be lost, stolen, or damaged, your progress in games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is toast, as you can neither move save data from one console to another nor personally back it up to a hard drive. The following current and upcoming Switch games do not support Save Data Cloud backups: Splatoon 2, Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu, Pokemon Let's Go Eevee, Dark Souls Remastered, Dead Cells, FIFA 19, NBA 2K19, and NBA Playgrounds.
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Nintendo's Promised Cloud Saves On Switch Won't Work For Every Game More

Nintendo's Promised Cloud Saves On Switch Won't Work For Every Game

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  • Why is Nintendo being so restrictive with saves? (Score:3)

    by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Friday September 07, 2018 @05:01PM (#57272522) Homepage

    I don't think I've ever seen a company lock down saves this much. It used to be save games were completely open; you could trade them with friends, experiment and so on. Nintendo seems to want to stop that for some reason. Why?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Considering the number of times that hacked save games have been used to exploit consoles (even on Nintendo's own systems) it makes sense to lock it all down.

      • Back in the Amiga days, cracked games sometimes came with viruses, and instead of being able to play the games, we died. If only Nintendo had bought Commodore at the time and "locked everything down", there would not have been such exploits, and we wouldn't have died. And if we hadn't all died, and had in fact been able to buy further Commodore products, Commodore would not have died either. Nintendo are wonderful people. XOXO

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by neovoxx ( 818095 )

      Each of these games have mechanics in them that would be broken/exploited by having the ability to restore a save file to a previous version.

      In Splatoon 2, you could restore a lost ranking, in Pokemon you could trade away all your pokemon then restore your save to get them back, in Dark Souls (which features perma-death as an option) you could die then restore your save to act as if nothing ever happened, etc. The sports games for whatever reason, have multi-gigabyte save files which are impractical to syn

      • Splatoon 2's data, and any competitive multiplayer game's data, should be stored SERVER SIDE.

        Pokemon? They literally sell a separate service called Pokemon Bank for this shit.

        Dark Souls has a minimal online component, and anything related to it can be stored online on the same servers than handle invading / assisting.
        If someone restores their save file from the cloud and their account online has a later timestamp than the current save file, flag the account and trigger a local file save to update its times

    • They haven't indicated why that is. Part of me just feels they're shafting folks. Some of me wants to believe that they just didn't write any of the code to do cloud saves into these games. However, that last part gets me thinking, "well shit, that means they've tossed their API together at the last minute, that's not good.". Either way, par for the course for Nintendo.
    • Because malformed saves have been used time and time again to exploit shitty save parsers in games, and run unsigned code. It's been a thing since long before the Switch. Remember rooting the original Xbox using a USB stick? But if you're worried about Switch savegame lockdown, worry not. You can short a few pins together and boot an unsigned OS, thanks to a buffer overflow in their secure boot implementation. Then use JKSV to copy your saves to your card and edit them.
    • It seems like one obvious reason is that a lot of Fremium games contain paid in-game resources and their whole business model would be ruined by save game editing.
  • Dear Nintendo Management: A fantastic feature would be if Nintendo Online encrypted all game saves with military grade encryption that cannot be cracked. This way if some villainous "deviant" were to figure out "an illegal way to move save files", that horrible, horrible person would be unable to do anything productive with those save files. Please let me know if you like my suggestion. P.S. My CV is attached to this email. If you have an open position in the "customer shafting department", I would love to

  • some of their own games are listed? i really hope they will update those so that 'cloud' saves will work.
    i can understand some 3rd party games won't be supported.

    can't figure out this company, making games that are loved by millions of people, but they get about everything else wrong.

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