GOG Will Start Deleting Cloud Saves This Summer 35
GOG, a Poland-based popular gaming platform, has announced plans to enforce a 200MB limit on cloud save files per game. This move may adversely affect players of open-world titles like Cyberpunk 2077, where save folders can reach several gigabytes. A report adds: The company will begin deleting game saves that exceed the limit on Aug 31. When the deadline rolls around, GOG will delete saves for each game, beginning with the oldest until it's below the 200MB threshold. That means your newest saves will survive.
Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:4, Interesting)
What, do they dump core or something? How does a game need that much save data? Sounds like it is keeping too much history detail. A save file should contain exactly enough data to reconstruct the current state, not the entire history of everything you have done. I'm guessing this is a side effect of companies doing anti-cheat detection, not caring about the negative side effects.
Re: Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:2)
How does that work with a limit of 200 MB per game? If the title requires gigabytes to save your progress are you just limited to only saving on your local machine I guess?
Re: Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most GoG users do this anyway. Cloud saves are nice, but one of the best things about GoG is the full offline functionality of any game you buy there.
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Hmm. You can certainly start the games offline without DRM, but don't some of the games still depend online servers for multi-player mode ?
Presumably some games don't support single-player at all. I'm not sure, as I have only bought single-player games from GOG.
Re: Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:2)
I don't know of many multiplayer games without DRM. Most of them are old games that predate DRM. Those modern games that support this tend to be single player focused games that happen to offer multiplayer as a bonus. Games that are multiplayer focused almost always use DRM, probably because the vast majority are competitive and they want to implement anti cheat.
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That makes sense about the anti-cheat part. I don't know if there is any other way than DRM to prevent it. Seems like there could be, if most of the game logic was server-side and very little locally, without necessarily going into extremes like the failed Stadia.
I still remember the days when multi-player meant hooking up two PS2s via Firewire, and geting a split-screen display on a large CRT.
Heck, it wasn't that long ago that multi-player worked on a single computer, with a pair of joysticks, in 4 amazing
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If you look at their catalog, you'll find that the vast majority of the publishers that sell on GoG list single player games. There are a few "old school" - type games that allow hosted multiplayer, but you won't find subscription MMOs or GaaS (Games as a Service).
The worst offenders they have are titles that phone home if possible (see: GoG version of Horizon:Zero Dawn or pretty much any modern Unity title) or CDPR games that require the Galaxy launcher to activate certain features (looking at you, Cyberp
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If a game depends on an online server, then maybe the saves can be stored there.
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Most GoG users do this anyway. Cloud saves are nice, but one of the best things about GoG is the full offline functionality of any game you buy there.
That's not how cloud save works. You can be fully offline and it will still sync your saves to the cloud. It just does it next time you run the client. You may *think* you're saving everything locally - and you have, that's literally how all saves work -, but unless you have disabled cloud saves in the client or for the game you are still syncing them.
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You're thinking Steam's model, where everything is ran from a separate client.
That's nothing like how GoG works. There is no mandatory client. You just get an executable from their store, run it to install game and then run the game. There's no online account involved anywhere while running the game. There's no launcher/client. There's just a game executable that you run. That's it.
So there's no account to sync to.
Re: Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:3)
Yeah save games for things like fall out in Skyrim can also get really huge. It's because you don't continually save over the same file you create a new save every single time and there are also usually several Auto saves and a couple of backup saves. This is how steam has been doing it forever you have cloud saves but it only backs up the last few not all of them for each game.
Re:Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Many games generate parts of the world as you enter them, and then keep the created maps, they also have rewind/replay feature where previous states of the game are tracked.
Re:Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly that, actually. A lot of save game files simply dump the current memory state of the game to disk. Loading is simply then loading up the memory state and resuming execution. It's a lot easier to do this than to actually enumerate the state of every object, serialize and save them all individually, then parse them back out later. This is a lot of work and game development is such that this kind of thing isn't
In the very late 90s and early 2000s this was probably the absolutely easiest way to save a game state - your game didn't have much RAM and disk space was cheap.
Re:Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly that, actually. A lot of save game files simply dump the current memory state of the game to disk. Loading is simply then loading up the memory state and resuming execution. It's a lot easier to do this than to actually enumerate the state of every object, serialize and save them all individually, then parse them back out later. This is a lot of work and game development is such that this kind of thing isn't
In the very late 90s and early 2000s this was probably the absolutely easiest way to save a game state - your game didn't have much RAM and disk space was cheap.
Pretty much what a pre-XML/zip Microsoft Word save file was - a memory dump. That was why they had so much trouble making them work between versions.
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Exactly that, actually. A lot of save game files simply dump the current memory state of the game to disk. Loading is simply then loading up the memory state and resuming execution. It's a lot easier to do this than to actually enumerate the state of every object, serialize and save them all individually, then parse them back out later. This is a lot of work and game development is such that this kind of thing isn't
In the very late 90s and early 2000s this was probably the absolutely easiest way to save a game state - your game didn't have much RAM and disk space was cheap.
I've not seen a released game do that. You have any examples? To be clear I have plenty of save folders over 200MB. E.g. my Cyberpunk2077 (mentioned in TFS) save folder is 450MB. Not because the saves are memory dumps, the largest is 5MB, but because there's over 170 saves in the folder. That's the big issue here.
It doesn't make sense to memory dump the game, many modern games happily use your memory if you have it to spare. The largest save file I have found on my PC is 25MB.
I say released game because I d
Re: Gigabytes? For save data? (Score:1)
Marketing GOG (Score:2)
The only time I see shit posted about GOG is because of something related to their download client (which is completely unnecessary to play games). I feel like their best marketing strategy might be to make periodic annoying changes to the download client to get name recognition.
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I don't even use that client much. It's simpler to just download manually, store the pieces on a usb driver for archive, then install.
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You have a very strange definition of the word "simpler". Personally I just click a button.
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lgogdownloader* and a cron job. All my installers are on my NAS smb share. No clicking.
*https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader
Re: Marketing GOG (Score:2)
I just click on a link, then click the download.
But I don't need to launch the client, so yeah, simpler without the client.
Re: Marketing GOG (Score:2)
I've never used the client. I didn't even know there was one for a while.
CLoud = other peoples computers (Score:2)
And this kids, is why it's never a good idea to store data in "the cloud" (a.k.a. other peoples computers). The hosting provider can delete it it on a whim (and regularly do).
If your data's important keep it local and backed up. And if it's really important also encrypt it.
Wonky savedata caused by the dev. (Score:3, Funny)
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cyberpunk 2077 save that can reach several gigabytes
"Saves" plural. Cyberpunk 2077 saves aren't large, only a few MB. But they also aren't limited in any way so you're more than welcome to generate 1000 saves. If you don't then you won't have a problem. My Cyberpunk 2077 save folder is currently 450MB. That is 19 autosaves, 8 quick saves, and 157 manual saves. They get larger over time, e.g. end game saves are about 5MB, while early game saves are 2MB. Not in any way bad.
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But still, a deduplication could probably turn those 450MB into something minimal. Specially taking in consideration a plethora of users with savegames, most blocks where those saves are stored are probably identical. And deduplication isn't something new.
It's 2024. 450MB to cover over 170 saves is minimal, especially for a game that is close to 100GB in size. There's no point in de-duplicating something irrelevant. This is cyberpunk2077, the modern day crysis. We're not running this game on a pocket calculator. Even if GOG enforces a 200MB limit you still have more than enough to cover all auto save slots, quick save slots, and have another 50+ slots spare for manual saves.
I had the game crash on me yesterday. I would be very pissed if someone were fucking
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How much save data is redundant? (Score:2)
Barring any type of encryption a game might do on a safe file, how much of save data is redundant between users of the same game? Does GOG need to save the same data for every user if it's not unique between users?
I'm asking, I honestly don't know :D
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That's not the issue. In fact the very game that is quoted in TFS has saves which are about 2-5MB in size. The bigger issue is the lack of limits on saves. My CP2077 save folder is over 450MB, not because the saves are inefficient, but because I have over 170 of them.
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