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This Cloud Kind Of Stinks
I’m a pretty paranoid person, which is why I don’t like thinking about my game saves. The thought of all my hard work disappearing into the ether because of a power surge, spill, or other accident makes me shiver and cringe. (Also, realizing that I consider my game progress to be “hard work” makes me shiver and cringe a bit, too.)
One way to mitigate this possible data loss is by backing up data into the cloud, which is a cute way of saying “networked off-site storage.” In other words, if I can’t trust that my house isn’t going to explode, it makes sense to have backups of critical data saved elsewhere, which I could then be retrieved at a later time.
PC users and PlayStation Plus members have been able to do this for a while now. Microsoft introduced the functionality to the Xbox 360 in the latest dashboard update. Unfortunately, they screwed it up in a pretty fundamental way.
Xbox 360 gamers get cloud saves dished up to them as being an either/or proposition. Either you save your games locally, on your console’s hard drive or a USB stick, or you put your save remotely on the cloud. That’s dumb. Instead of forcing players to choose A or B, Microsoft should let players the following options:
A) Save my game locally
B) Save it onto the cloud
C) Save it locally AND onto the cloud
Here’s why: I don’t implicitly trust my local game saves, but I trust them a lot more than I do this magical cloud thing. And there’s a reason for this.
I’ve been playing Tiny Tower on my Android phone. It’s a fun game, and it uses cloud saves. Whatever! Great! Then one day there was a hiccup in the system, and when I started the game up I lost about a week’s worth of progress. Not great! Fortunately, a day or so later everything was back to normal. But because my save wasn’t held locally, I was (and still am, actually) at the mercy of the game’s publisher to keep things running safe and sound. All it took was an error on their end to ruin my progress, albeit temporarily.
If something like that happened to a PS3 or PC player, they’d likely have a local copy of their save handy, so they wouldn’t have lost their progress. As long as the Xbox 360 boils things down to a binary here/there decision, you’re basically entrusting your data with them.
Like I said before, I don’t trust my USB drive 100 percent. But I’m not sure that following Microsoft blindly is any safer a proposition. Why not give me, and everyone else using the platform, a change to use it as a save-game supplement instead of a replacement? That’s kind of what this whole cloud thing is about, anyway.
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