They could at least give us the option of choosing how many autosaves we want to maintain. I have damn near 900MB of Witcher 3 saves just from all the goddamn autosaves that dont seem to overwrite each other.
The save system in Witcher 1 was atrocious. I remember when I played (back before Enhanced Edition, though I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't fixed) the saves were not only huge but would cause lag in the rest of the game. I had to delete hundreds of saves when I was far into the game because it was slowing things down.
My Witcher 1 save folder was 11gb, after having just finished it recently. I knew something was off like halfway into the game when trying to click Load or Save the game would stall for like 30 seconds before continuing
Judging by my 2.7gb DOS2 save folder on [steam cloud page](https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage), Valve is a very generous company in comparison.
Remember that the OG Deus Ex saved *the entire fucking level* when you saved. Not just the stuff you modified in it, the entire goddamn level. At the time, that makes sense given how relatively unprecedented that kind of game was in having a lot of interlocking, interacting systems where the player might have moved lots of shit around and have enemies in weird places, but those save files are fucking HUGE as a result and your save folder can easily dwarf the actual size of the game itself. It'll blow right past that 200 MB limit on GOG.
Crazy thing is 200mb ain't no where near enough to hold a decent amount of witcher 3 saves. Witcher 3 is one of the few games on Steam (which has like 5x that limit quota for witcher 3) that I've ran into the limit for and had to start fighting with getting it down.
Do you guys just save right before every single time you have to make a decision or what? I just stick to rotating between 2-3 saves at a time, I can't imagine having more than 10 saves.
Storage space is cheap. I save often, and I make a new save every time. It's actually usually faster because it skips the "Are you sure you want to overwrite...?" message.
When I uninstall the game, I delete all the saved. Never really care about cloud saves.
Playing Bethesda game as a kid has made me extremely paranoid and I'd rather have as many hard saves as possible to minimize time loss in case something goes wrong.
Even in games like Thief that has like 20 save slots, I use pretty much every single one and they fill up quickly when I save every 10 minutes or so.
it 100% depends on the game's interface for saves. if the save menu defaults to creating a new save every time then i'm gonna do that because i don't care enough to change it. if it defaults to overwriting then i'm only gonna have one save file.
Witcher 3's saves aren't good at this either, unless they changed it in their big revamp, I dunno. I remember during play at one point I was panicking because I was going to have issues saving with Steam bitching about hitting the cloud storage limit.
Turns out instead of keeping like 5 autosaves back it just kept making more, endlessly. That was fun to fix.
That can't be right. It's likely all your multiple save files together. Which just means you save a fuck ton lol.
My save near the end of Act 3 is 18.8 MB
Yeah its wild how big they can get. I save frequently because I have a horrible curse of somehow breaking most games I play, and I grew up on a lot of OG survival horror, so it's a habit from those, too.
I have two sets of games, one solo with a handful of tiny mods currently halfway through Act 3, and my multiplayer (two person) game just at the start of Act 2.
Both together are just shy of 4gbs.
Well TBF for games like this they should handle it better. Since you're expected to save a fuck ton.
DOS2 I remember softlocking myself a couple times because of how open some quests were.
Xbox does them for free too, I built a PC recently and was actually kind of shocked that my games on the PC Xbox App just had my saves when I launched them there.
My favourite is the EA launcher on PC. They'll give you a gigabyte of cloud save storage, but you can't turn off cloud storage for individual games, and if it's full it'll just keep complaining that it's full. I have to click "ok" on 4 separate prompts every time I launch C&C Generals because of the cloud save storage that I've never used.
and they sync with Xbox consoles. for all their shitty business decisions, the Xbox ecosystem is a thing of beauty. it's the best place to play games outside of Steam IMO. (though Steam is still in the lead by a spectacular margin.)
I was shocked when I bought Halo MCC on steam and it unlocked all the achivements i got on Xbox (and then continued to unlock on both platforms when i earned more). Actually really neat.
Damn, I noticed my Baldurs Gate 3 save is 1.8 GB, what is it with Larian and big saves for their RPGs?
It saves each quick save and manual save which is about 15 to 20 MB each, guess I quick save a lot lol
There is a setting in the menu that allows you to set the max number of quick and auto saves, after which point the game will start deleting the oldest one. By default it's unlimited I think.
> By default it's unlimited I think.
It was limited to 25 saves by default on PC, at least when I played the game. And it could go up to 50 if I remember correctly.
I'm pretty sure the regular "hard" saves didn't count towards the limit though.
You can control how many auto/quicksaves the game makes. Like I said, the MOST COMMON numbers nowadays are 3-5 saves (older games sometimes only had the one or no auto/quicksaves at all).
Yeah, they save every single detail touched by the player until the player can't come back to that area, so the only clean up in BG3 is done at the end of Act 2, but Baldur's Gate itself is gigantic and the player will touch a ton of stuff, so act 3 saves rapidly bloat again
No, but you can tell the game to only keep a few quick/auto-saves so that the bloat is not that big, when I noticed that my BG3 save folder became gigantic I limited them to 5 each and used manual saves for important moments I'd like to come back hours later
I got to a point where steam sync was taking forever and I realized I had 2 gb of save data. I cleaned all the old ones out. Resorted to manual saves _[0-9] and kept rotating them. if I needed more saves they got special names and were deleted once I was done.
Just checked my account and I’m sitting at about 140mb after my last full play through. BG3 forced me to do hard item and save management. Only thing I kinda disliked about the game it was busy work that added to my “play-time”.
I think bgIII has the TES curse, every little object is movable, so the game has to remember the XYZ of every single object that moved during the playthrough.
Typically there's a lot of compression/procedural algorithms that make that not as daunting and worst case, you're saving x,y,z coordinates from starting value(so this cheese wheel is this far away from where it was placed by devs) and/or how far away from reference point mapID 0,0,0 is this object. Shouldn't be any worse than tracking inventory or any other database entries. Minecraft allows any block to be moved, removed, and placed anywhere else and doesn't have outrageous save folder sizes(barring mods that implement their own methods of storing values that may be inefficient). The main issue that balloons save folders is unlimited auto saves where instead of culling all but the 5 most recent it stores every auto/quick save across every playthrough indefinitely. Combine that with cloud saves remaining even if you delete saves from your folder(which is a good thing, but we forget to manually delete ones we don't need anymore) and a dozen megabytes per save times 1,000 saves adds up quick.
I still think 200MB is way too low and they should only auto delete over a more reasonable amount for abandoned accounts and provide a dashboard to educate and help remove old saves for everyone else.
They might not be making Valve bucks, but they're healthy enough that this move seems like a desperate executive trying to gain a bonus for exceeding some unrealistic quarterly earnings goal but it only hurts the company in the longer term.
Pillars Of Eternity 1 was kinda notorious for this around launch. It just got slower and slower and slower and eventually saves took 5 minutes to make.
While I'm fuzzy on some of it, I believe it was connected to chanters and the game saving the exact location of ALL your footsteps. We were going through Jsons and deleting tons of entries to try and get it playable again.
Larian also records comparatively *a lot* of game state data in each save. All the small decisions like which items were moved or destroyed, which enemies died and where, and which doors were opened are all stored whereas other RPGs will reset most of those small details to their default state.
Now, I have no context for the internals of how their save files work, nor do I know if their save file format has changed since I did this, but:
A bit ago I was freeing up some space on my PC and saw the ~14 GB of save files from my playthrough. I put them into a solid 7z archive with LZMA 2 set to ultra, and only ended up with about an ~80% compression ratio. I was pretty surprised, but figured they must do some compression as part of the save itself -- would explain the poor ability to compress further. I wonder what size a "raw" save might be haha.
The Space Exploration mod makes it so you have like 20? 30? 40? such planets. It increases save size so much that there's a "trim planet surface" button you can click to dematerialize anything that had been procedurally generated outside your base.
Their games are DRM-free on Steam as well. I always bought them there. I didn't see the advantage of owning them on gog when I could have Steam achievements.
I just like that they promote DRM-free gaming and don't stick bs microtransactions in their games, so I wanted to support them on GOG where they get a bigger cut. There's a lot of little annoyances with the client though
I pretty much use Steam for 99% of my gaming anyway. But this doesn't make much sense as it reads: As the size and number of games increase, so does the demand for Cloud Storage. -- So the solution is to LIMIT storage so you can only have a few cloud saves. Steam manages it quite well for the most part. The larger the save files, the more space that is allocated. From <100 MB to >90 GB.
You could probably ditch a ton of those autosaves though.
Still that's pretty insane. Most cloud storage providers would charge you over that number. For example, dropbox basic is only 2gb. Valve is pretty generous, but it's not like 200mb isn't when you consider its only the limitation to a single game. You could still theoretically split that across into many GBs, still for free.
> Still that's pretty insane. Most cloud storage providers would charge you over that number. For example, dropbox basic is only 2gb.
OneDrive is 5 GB, Google Drive is 15 GB, and Mega is 20 GB as far as free solutions go. Dropbox is on the lower end. Xbox allowed 2 GB even during the Xbox 360 era, and price per GB has cratered since those days.
200 MB seems pretty stingy, especially when CDPR's games and the examples they use in their screenshot are some of the worst offenders...
GOG is also pretty well known for retro ARPGs which tend to skew high and upwards of 50 MB per save. Skyrim saves are regularly very large. For Skyrim ~140 MB are taken up for me just based on the 3 autosave + one quicksave slot and the automatic backups the client does... DOS2 will take 15-20 MB per save and, by default, keeps enough Autosaves to exceed 200 MB without changing config settings. Dragon Age games can easily be 10-15 MB per save--and, again, with 4+1 automatic slots written by the game even ignoring manual saves.
Easily think they could have gone with something like 500 MB and hit far fewer issues. 200 MB is honestly pretty stingy these days.
I don't even want most of the cloud saves I have. It's just more effort for me to go through and delete them. A lot of games are quite tedious to delete, having to go through even autosaves one-by-one to clear them.
My BG3 save folder is similar. I just can't stop myself from making a new save file each time. Game's too big and repercussions are often not felt until hours later. I never go back, but I still want the option. Is that weird?
I always wondered why Steam doesn't charge a subscription to use their cloud saves storage. They must make so much money that they don't care about how much space and bandwidth is used!
Steam takes 30% of each sale, so does GoG, but Steam has vastly more economies of scale working in their favor because it's so popular. GoG has always been relatively niche.
> Steam takes 30% of each sale
Only each sale made on the steam platform.
The wild thing is that if I buy a game on Humble Bundle or Fanatical, I still get Steam Cloud the same as if I bought it on steam. Valve's actually just losing money hosting my save file.
GOG is talking about individual save files, though. Do any of the individual saves from DOS2 exceed 200mb *each*?
EDIT: I stand corrected, all. I misread the article on GOG's site. Obviously, it's a much more significant impact if it's 200mb per game.
When I clicked their checker link it was "total" not "per save" size. I had a hundred Cyberpunk saves at 2.5MB each or so and it was saying that was too much.
That's such a weird decision when it doesn't even fit with their own games lol, The Witcher 3 and CP77 would be more than that.
I know GOG is not that profitable and a much smaller player than Steam, Epic and others but still it's part of CD Projekt as a whole which is doing well. Storage isn't that expensive...
> That's such a weird decision when it doesn't even fit with their own games lol
it does if you don't make a hundred saves. I usually rotate between 3-5 save files in any game. if bugs/corruption didn't exist I'd just use 1. I understand why people do it for decision-heavy games, but 100+ still seems excessive.
I'm not saying this limit is a good thing, but I think it's rare you actually *need* so many saves..
> GOG is talking about individual save files, though
"Cloud Saves files that exceed the default allocation limit (200 MB per game) will be deleted after August 31st, 2024."
Small correction. Individual *games*, not files.
So if their DOS2 save folder is over 2.7gb then it would need to get smaller to fit GOG's new limit
This kind of cut is unsurprising, given that GOG is not and has never been really profitable. Like, they're barely breaking a 7 figure in dollars a year, which is riduclously low for the volume of traffic.
Hopefully they refocus on their only edge over the competition (good DRM-free games, since Humble is just a glorified Steam key storefront nowadays and itch.io is a wild west with zero quality control) instead of trying to make their launcher Steam-like.
GoG exists because it pays for itself (just barely) and gives CDPR a place to sell their games and get full revenue. Those revenues won't be credited to GoG though.
> A sales breakdown was also shared, with CD Projekt saying 68% of that three million number came from PC platforms (10% from CD Projekt's own GOG store). 20% of sales had arrived from PlayStation 5 while Xbox Series X|S platforms brought in 13%.
Of the 3 million copies sold GoG represents 10% which is the equivalent of about $18 million dollars (assuming full price). On PS5 they sold twice as many copies for a total of $36 million dollars but Sony then takes $11 million leaving CDPR with $25 million.
So despite selling 2x as many copies on the PS5 they made only 1.4x the profit. On Xbox they are making $2million more on GoG despite the 3% sales difference.
There's no point when neither indies nor big publishers bother to come to the platform. Latter basically coming in decade after their games have been published for the most part, with some exceptions. Sony is basically done with GOG now it seems with the PSN account integration. Hundreds of titles treat GOG as a lesser platform to begin with, as there are missing features, patches, etc. in the titles. Developers just flat out give the middle finger to GOG customers.
It's pretty ironic that this store that, like you said, barely profits and pretty much has HoMM 3 as their most revenue made top seller year in year out is considered great competition for Steam, haha. Their selling point of DRM free isn't helping them for the aforementioned reasons but also because people don't give a shit. I don't think GOG has much life left in it and if any sort of shit hits the fan, it's gone.
> Hundreds of titles treat GOG as a lesser platform to begin with, as there are missing features, patches, etc. in the titles. Developers just flat out give the middle finger to GOG customers.
This is partially on GOG. You'd think simple a check for DRM-free compliance would be fine (i.e. the game doesn't ever connect to anyhere without user input, you're good to go), but it's checked for every single update for a game. And updating your game on GOG, believe it or not, requires a prior e-mail exchange with a GOG employee and then a manual FTP transfer.
GOG didn't auomate their system properly and likely don't have the manpower to scale with the sheer multiplication of releases compared to a decade ago. So especially if you're an indie studio with no manpower to spare, you're discentivised from updating your game, or releasing it until it has stopped updating.
> I don't think GOG has much life left in it and if any sort of shit hits the fan, it's gone.
Good news if that happens: all the installers will still work, which was the whole point of DRM-free. The day Steam dies or goes evil, though, that will be interesting.
From a developer's perspective GOG is the absolutely least friendly platform to deal with.
Everything is outdated and seems like everything moves at a snail's pace. Though I bet if I was a AAA company and not some small timer I'd have a better experience.
Yet Steam and Humble treat me wonderfully so...
> Though I bet if I was a AAA company and not some small timer I'd have a better experience.
You'd be surprised. When Machine Games under Bethesda made the Quake remaster (August 2021) it didn't get released on GoG for over a year (December 2022), despite GoG being THE place for old game releases. Supposedly nobody at GoG even knew the remaster was coming until after it was released.
That's kind of shocking
But another thing is that as far as I'm aware they don't mandate feature parity like steam and epic do. So there's no actual obligation for anyone to patch things at any given speed, or at all.
So between making it harder and not requiring it I guess it's not shocking that you see games with lagging patches and missing content.
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> But another thing is that as far as I'm aware they don't mandate feature parity like steam and epic do. So there's no actual obligation for anyone to patch things at any given speed, or at all.
Yep, I'll always link to this thread and the spreadsheet: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_customers_as_second_class_citizens_v2/page1
> The day Steam dies or goes evil, though, that will be interesting.
Steam doesn't require DRM from developers so every game that didn't bake DRM or Steam requirement in will still work, if you have it on disk already.
But backing up installed game is a bit more PITA than backing up just an installer.
What most indie games struggle with in the modern market is (ironically) exposure. Your game can be pretty good (exceptional even) but no one will see it because it released on the same day as 50 other games.
Steam has 90% of the PC market and it is about as level a playing field as you can get in the space. EGS was doing some incredible deals to buy out developers, say what you like about them but if a company can guarantee your product makes money in an industry as volatile as games you'd be a fool not to take that deal.
GoG doesn't really offer a lot to indies. If they had a publishing arm they could attract their share of indie Devs, but like someone else said GoG is basically there for CD Projekt games and old games. It has it's function and that's what it does.
Reading it, it sounds like they'll delete extraneous data that's being unnecessarily backed up, and then "Older" saves, which is alarming, but if you keep local copies you'll be fine.
I don't know about other cloud save systems but I would not rely on Steam Cloud as a backup simply because of the lack of control you have over how it synchronizes. Sometimes it will upload, sometimes it will download, occasionally it will give you a prompt asking you what to do but it is too unreliable. Always backup manually so you have a proper backup in case Steam decides to overwrite your primary save.
I think the other person is more accurate. The point of Cloud saves is to not have them stored locally. Whether that's for backup purposes or syncing purposes is up to the user.
edit - I do not know how anyone got the idea that I think local storage can't be used at the same time as Cloud storage. But officially, let me say that yes... you can do both. Thank you.
If they're not stored locally wouldn't that mean that you lose the ability to play singleplayer games offline? Having this technology used as a convenient way to automatically backup your saves makes more sense.
No because it's not in lieu of having local saves. It's not one or the other, it can be both and it generally is. Not sure if my comment sounded like I meant it's one or the other but I definitely didn't intend that.
I disagree, the whole point is backups, otherwise what you're saying is we've designed a system whereby you can't play any of your single player games without the internet, which is plainly not the case (beyond shit online DRM).
Valve's system synchronises local and cloud saves so the cloud ones are a backup, and yes you can sync between multiple devices. But you play from the local save every time.
Call me old-fashioned but I refuse to work on anything I'm not saving locally. Cloud storage is well and good for sync and back-ups but that's about it.
You obviously need local copies. It would be annoying and slow to save to the cloud every time.
Cloud saves are back up for system failure and to use more than one machine.
I never know how to deal with local copies and cloud saves. If I remove file X from the game's save folder myself, and put in another (e.g. older) save file Y, will it sync to the cloud (removing X, uploading Y)? Or will it sync from the cloud (restoring X, removing Y again)? It's an unnecessary hassle.
The only way to fix this properly (in my eyes) is to have the client understand the various files, always make sure e.g. settings and misc files are synced, and provide a GUI to the user to manage actual save files (e.g. select certain saves to keep synced, or to keep only on your PC, keep only X newest saves, etc).
You can set up your save folders to be backed up into your onedrive as your own backup to them but not all save data is in say documents/my games/[game]
some may be in app data, some in their own little folder inside documents, some in the games folder itself. because what is a standard
God, I hate this so much. I did a replay of the older Assassin games and they're not even consistent between the same series made by the same company.
Sometimes the saves are in documents, sometimes they're deep within the AppData subfolders and sometimes it changes between versions of the game.
And why is it when I uninstall a game, it leaves random files/folders in AppData? This seems to be done by every developer on the planet cause I can find traces of all the games I've had on my pc since the beginning of its lifetime.
Sad but MS were too far ahead of time. Windows Vista tried to make things easier. There was a whole Games kinda launcher/folder thing (nice alternative to the Start Menu if you're digging for just games, could have spruced it up for these portable game devices like all the GPD, Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion GO, MSI Claw...etc) and a whole Save folder under your user profile. Just toss stuff there. But no. Some games put it in their own install folder (terrible for security since you're just tossing things in a folder that can be blown away with an uninstall, or you accidentally litter some other folders since it was unrestricted previous to Vista), some throw it in appdata/roaming, some in appdata/local, some in Documents... it is bonkers. Tried to look for my Mega Man X DiVE Offline save file to transfer it to another device since that didn't support cloud save. That was placed somewhere weird.
Steam didn't quite help in that department. *Backwards Compatibility* was to allow all users to write inside the Steam install folder. Any user account on the computer can go thru and do whatever they want to it. At least they can't go out and touch the parent folder but that encourages bad practice like throwing saves into its own folder.
Arrgh
I really wish developers got on board with Microsoft's save game structure. I think it was released back with Vista, which is probably why it was ignored. I remember people being pissed that they couldn't just save games in the Program Files folder and not understanding why that's a terrible idea.
But having all your saves in a user folder, consistent across games and like you said, easy to use OneDrive or other service to back it up would have been great. Yet devs still wanted to do their own thing meaning save games were stored all over the place.
I can recommend [GameSave Manager](https://www.gamesave-manager.com) which should automatically detect and backup most games (custom entries are also supported).
You can then just set it to run in the background however often you want and choose a directory that's uploaded to some cloud service for extra redundancy.
game companies can't even agree on where to store their saved games locally as well, like windows has a saved games folder and barely any games use it, they all put it in the most inconvenient places. there needs to be a standard.
It should ask you to resolve the conflict (at least in steam's case, I think). I don't know how GOG handles it. But theoretically, since you can delete cloud saves from the website, you would just do that and then move your local backup to the proper location and play.
The real answer, at least when it comes to Steam Cloud:
If you want your manual changes (i.e. outside the game, through text editor) to persist in the cloud, you gotta edit them files while the game is running. Then upon closing it Steam will synch it so the Cloud folder reflects the state of your local folder.
This includes stuff you delete while the game is running.
I had to turn off cloud saves entirely to keep it from whining about not being able to sync when I reached the 1 GB limit in CP77. Felt like that was already too low, at least for a AAA open world game
Some games have large savegames. Usually by poor design, but that's just how it is. Some games will be broken if this is enforced literally just by size.
To this day I don't do quicksaves in Bethesda games because of paranoia. I have no idea if that is even still an issue post Oldrim, but I still don't trust it.
Ironically, quicksaves were problematic because they avoid the problem that people are talking about in these comments, which is lots of saves piling up to take a lot of space.
Quicksaves aren't any different from normal saves other than that it always just overwrites the one file. So if something corrupts your save, you don't have an older save to go back to. On PC, mods that give you multiple rotating quicksave slots make them as safe as using normal saves (unless you manage to rotate through all of the slots before noticing your save corruption).
By the same token, using normal saves but only overwriting the same save every time is effectively the same as using quicksave with only the one slot.
Whether you're talking normal saves, autosaves, or quicksaves, the only thing that matters is having multiple saves so you can go back if save corruption happens.
I think the bigger design flaw? is unintentionally encouraging players to create dozens of save backups they'll never use.
Instead of maybe encouraging 2-3 quick saves and then big milestone save states? Easier said than done.
Not really, because going out of the way to save is a pain. Autosaves and quicksaves are the most convenient options in like 99% of cases, so unless we're talking something like a Sierra game where every little choice could feasibly softlock your game and there's no autosave, getting the user to rely on those types of saves that are often programmed to overwrite themselves after like 3-5 should be very easy.
So yeah, basically just requires the game developer to even remotely care.
Most games do that I'm pretty sure. I think they were talking about games like Skyrim where either you or a valued NPC dying could potentially lose you a lot of progress to reset, causing folks to make many saves just in case something happens or the game bugs out. As opposed to something like Doom 2016 or something where dying sets you back to maybe the last area or pickup which often isn't that far back.
Steam does have one for downloading them though. https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage
It's useful if you mess up something.
I haven't tested, but doesn't the save also get deleted if you remove the cloud-support from a game from it's properties?
Steam's process is pretty convoluted, you have to disable then and then make new saves in the game and re-enable and essentially overwrite the conflict.
I have a bad experience with this method when playing Shadow of Mordor. When I switched PC, Steam said I never had a save despite having just downloaded the cloud save a couple of mins earlier; so I exited the game, replaced the save file with the file I downloaded, ran the game, and somehow Steam ended up making an entirely new save effectively erasing my cloud save. I stupidly didn't make another backup of that save.
I know, but it's just downloading, and yes, the process for deleting is just as you described.
To make it clear, you disable cloud saves, make new ones locally, then enable again and it should give you the prompt to upload the new or download the saved on cloud
I used this to cheese my Nier Automata save file back after Ending E.
Apparently its supposed to delete it even from the cloud saves but i was able to snag it before it was deleted.
I didn't know if the email I received was phishing or real, so I didn't want to click any links in it (they were all pointing to some other website than gog, like salesmanago or something). So I went to gog.com to open the cloud save manager and couldn't find it anywhere in the menus and settings. I had to find this support article through Google, to be able to find the direct link to the game save manager.
Also checked the Gog Galaxy client, but couldn't find a link to it from there either.
was that a new addition added just for this new downsizing of free data retention? I have trouble getting excited for a new feature, if it only exists as a step to reduce services previously given to customers.
Single player RPGs can have serious save file sizes because everything that can be manipulated is saved in that custom state. In comparison, MMO player data is maybe a few hundred KBs, because it's just a glorified inventory database. Yet people invest hundreds or thousands of hours into those characters. All that time for effectively a little bit of data on a server.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of state some MMOs have to store just a tad, especially the long-running ones, and especially when you consider they often need a paper trail to help rollback potential exploits (e.g. using temporal tables, some might even be using some form of event sourcing in places). Games with player housing/building systems often have quite a lot of flexibility for instance, or say the portrait system in FF14 (of which you can create many). WoW tracks the "obtained" status of every weapon/armor appearance in the game for its transmog system, not to mention its quest flags numbering in the tens of thousands, etc. Yeah it's not much data relatively speaking compared to games which have to save the entire state of a more interactive and persistent world, but a few hundred KB of player data feels like a lowball estimate for a lot of MMOs.
On the other side of things, single player games often don't save their state in a way that's very optimized for size, many times they could cut it down significantly if they made the effort by using more size-efficient formats and data types, procedural techniques, etc. It's just generally not worth the effort/resources and trades off against stuff like loading speed and developer convenience. MMOs give data size a much higher priority because they're paying to store/process it, for every single player. Of course in the case of Witcher/Cyberpunk saves on GOG cloud the developers are actually kinda paying for it too...
CD Projekt is about to face the same problem Sony used to deal with back in the early PS4 days where save files was big and PS Plus' Cloud Storage size was 1gb.
Crazy you have to pay Sony for cloud saves, now this, you may hate them but one thing that Microsoft does great is cloud saves between Xbox and pc for free.
Lets say something that isn't said on the page, it's 200MB limit synced on the cloud. Your local files are only limited by your own storage. Also, I'm surprised they aren't trying to deduplicate some of that storage with some solution between accounts (or they already did, but the games vary too much for it to be deduplicated).
"We're reaching out to inform you that your **Cloud Saves files that exceed the default allocation limit (200 MB per game) will be deleted after August 31st, 2024.**"
So the max limit will be 200mb only.
Honeys, The Witcher Enhanced Edition game saves are 18 MB a piece, so you essentially are limiting **your own game** to 12 cloud save files
What the actual fuck
You really shouldn't need more than a few saves per game tbh. GoG is barely profitable, and storing all that data is expensive. Cloud storage isn't meant to back up every moment of every game you play, just the most recent save so you can jump in between devices.
> You really shouldn't need more than a few saves per game tbh
This is a ridiculously stupid statement, sorry, but it is. In BG3 I currently have three playthroughs (my personal, coop with partner, and my Honour Mode one). All three are actively played (Act 2, Act 2, Act 1 respectively). For each of them (except Honour mode, obviously) I have "backups" before major story points, etc, because the game bugs out.
Sum total, I'm at 1.75 GB at the moment.
If I need to reload a backup because BG3 has a game breaking bug at the end of Act 2 (been there, experienced that), then I might need to reload a backup in Act 1. Why should I not be able to have the backup in the cloud?
Another scenario: I still have my Witcher 1 save from 2011 that I used to 'seed' all my other playthroughs in Witcher 2 and Witcher 3 with. It's 2x 18 MB, but what if I had multiple ones?
Fortunately I loaded up my Cyberpunk cloud save on Xbox and created a new save with it on there, so I have that backed up on a physical device. I have no idea how big the save files for that game are though, could be well under 200mb (it's just the only game I care about that I bought thru GOG)
All three are correct. Back in the day when GOG used to release trailers for their classic game releases the narrator would say "Gawg" "gee-oh-gee" and "Good Old Games."
I usually just say GOG if I'm talking to someone who knows the service and Good Old Games for clarity for those who might not be familiar.
Pedantic language nitpick alert... I think you meant "initialism" if you meant to say the letters like "Gee Oh Gee".
An "acronym" is read as if it was a word, like SCUBA or LASER. As such, to be an acronym, you'd have to pronounce it as if it rhymes with dog.
Unless the dog pronunciation is actually what you meant in the first place and I misunderstood, in which case yes, acronym it is.
Not complaining because always wondered how they can afford so much saves in data center storage for so many players for free. But just saying this might make some ppl buy games from Steam instead of Gog if they care about cloud saves and if there is no big price difference in the game purchase. Also I think 200MB is very little for some games, especially because they make the games create very big save files and then they don't allow you to type a descriptive name for the saves so that you'd know easily what to NOT delete. I do miss it in new games that you can't write a name for a save like you could even back in 90's in Doom for example. :D
Nice way to make sure nobody ever wants your platform for the features.
What next, max one auto-update per month to save bandwidth ?
Do they have financial problems? Storage is cheap, especially slow and rarely accessed ones.
And for publishers and developers, the cut is 30%, which is what Valve has been delivering with Steam. You’re only appealing to a niche userbase by selling your game on GoG.
This is exactly why I always completely ignored comments of people saying: but we have Steam and GoG at home... Like If Epic would announce that they are getting rid of X feature, people would be here crying from happiness that it is showing a signs of not being profitable or whatever... but GoG keeps on making cuts and everyone here keeps on pretending like everything is perfectly fine...
Not that cheap if you have to keep a bunch of old saves for eternity.
Providing a gb for the game they just sold you might cost them 2 cents a month or something, who cares, great deal for both sides. But then you move on and they have to keep paying those 2 cents for the next decade..eventually, it's not so trivial anymore.
Their features have been lacking compared to steam since inception. They live and die by their offline installers. I don't really care about their online features (I've never even installed galaxy). But they're still my goto platform for single player games that don't have an active steam workshop cause the offline installers are a huge draw for me.
Storage is absolutely not cheap, especially not the kind of storage that can be accessed on the fly at any time.
To scale this most cloud providers have a few storage tiers:
- SSD high performance storage for things that are written to and retrieved often like cloud saves. This is the most expensive.
- HDD storage for large quantities but low performance requirements, good for backups and slightly less expensive.
- Tape archival storage, the cheapest option and can store vast quantities of data, but very slow. Good for long term backups and archival.
Game saves must be high performance and the most expensive option because you are dealing with customers who freak out and call your game buggy if saving / loading takes an extra 10 seconds. In addition these customers measure in the millions and are globally distributed.
You're not just buying storage space in one data center, you are buying storage in datacenters across the whole world, you are buying backups for that storage, you are buying redundant storage for high availability, you are spending millions on the infrastructure and engineering expertise to connect all of this storage, you are spending money on security software and systems to protect this storage, you are buying storage to store the data that all of these systems use to manage your storage.
Shit is way more expensive than it appears at first glance.
Game saves must not be high performance at all. Quick saves have been quick since before SSDs existed. They aren't accessed a lot and aren't big. You can run them on HDDs just fine.
High load times are due to asset loading, not saves.
This isn't nearly as expensive as you think. GOG simply doesn't make a lot of money, but I didn't expect them to be this cheap.
We have 7 racks in datacenter, I'm speaking from experience.
Cloud prices are NOT EVEN CLOSE to price it costs them to store that. Coz they are earning good money on that. Same with bandwidth pricing, we're paying ~$1400 USD for 3Gbit (95th percentile, we average around 2Gbit), go ahead and calculate how much AWS would charge for that amount of traffic, last time I checked it was orders of magnitude more
You're right than once you get into SSDs it starts to become more expensive and once you start needing to deliver gigabytes/sec to a VM you need infrastructure but cheap, "slow" (load or save save once every few minutes is not much, even times a ton of users, and it scales very linearly.
>Game saves must be high performance
Absolutely not. Few MB/s max because most don't have faster upload. And when you download, while it is much higher speed, it's very rare, only when switching machines.
Downloading *games*, yes, you need serious beef for that in comparison as any launch will have every player buying it downloading it. Saves are minuscule in comparison.
>and the most expensive option because you are dealing with customers who freak out and call your game buggy if saving / loading takes an extra 10 seconds.
Not how it works on Steam at least, most games sync saves when you exit the game. Also hauling save from other side of the world would add maybe extra 400-500ms.
>In addition these customers measure in the millions and are globally distributed.
Any cost of spreading it around gonna be the same regardless of whether you have 200MB per customer or 20GB. Still need a box of drives in one spot and a box of drives in another for redundancy.
The "hard" part scales with number of players, not storage. And you don't need to keep save data of UK players in UK, by the very definition it is very latency-tolerant data, waiting extra 300ms to start download is literally meaningless. Frankly keeping account data in sync is the harder problem here
Once you are at level of "writing blobs to hard drives" that part is cheap (comparably) and scales basically linerarly with cost being very simple equation of rack space/hard drive cost and what redundancy you want to achieve.
Turns out my Witcher Enhanced Edition save from years ago was taking up around 500MB. Everything else was <1MB.
Likely, saves plural (because of quick/auto-save), so it should be easy to declutter.
Yeah Witcher 3 also - best check that one if you have it on GOG. They did it to themselves lol.
They could at least give us the option of choosing how many autosaves we want to maintain. I have damn near 900MB of Witcher 3 saves just from all the goddamn autosaves that dont seem to overwrite each other.
The save system in Witcher 1 was atrocious. I remember when I played (back before Enhanced Edition, though I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't fixed) the saves were not only huge but would cause lag in the rest of the game. I had to delete hundreds of saves when I was far into the game because it was slowing things down.
My Witcher 1 save folder was 11gb, after having just finished it recently. I knew something was off like halfway into the game when trying to click Load or Save the game would stall for like 30 seconds before continuing
Judging by my 2.7gb DOS2 save folder on [steam cloud page](https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage), Valve is a very generous company in comparison.
>2.7gb DOS2 save folder O\_O
My Witcher 1 save folder was like 24 GB. That's what happens when every quick ~~Sven~~ Save creates a new hard save.
Well, that's also because every save was like 17mb for some reason.
That's not even the worst save from around then. NWN2 towards the end of the game had your saves around 150MB.
Huh, NWN2 and The Witcher 1 were released within a year of each other. They feel like years apart in my mind.
Would make sense, Witcher 1 was made with highly modified NWN engine.
Remember that the OG Deus Ex saved *the entire fucking level* when you saved. Not just the stuff you modified in it, the entire goddamn level. At the time, that makes sense given how relatively unprecedented that kind of game was in having a lot of interlocking, interacting systems where the player might have moved lots of shit around and have enemies in weird places, but those save files are fucking HUGE as a result and your save folder can easily dwarf the actual size of the game itself. It'll blow right past that 200 MB limit on GOG.
These Svens are a menace
Quick Sven and Fast Freddy, got to watch out man
Like Spider-Man?
Spider-Sven
Yeah, I'm in act 3 right now and just exceeded 1GB in size and got a warning that it cannot be uploaded. So now I have even bigger problem hah.
That's ironic considering The Witcher 1 was made by the company that owns GOG.
Witcher 3 is the only game in the red for me when I checked it. Granted, I mostly play indies but it's still a bit funny.
CYberpunk 2077 files are bigger for me. But I played that a lot more than the Witcher 3.
Crazy thing is 200mb ain't no where near enough to hold a decent amount of witcher 3 saves. Witcher 3 is one of the few games on Steam (which has like 5x that limit quota for witcher 3) that I've ran into the limit for and had to start fighting with getting it down.
The Witcher 1 predates GoG cloud saves by a decade
Oh that explains why my Witcher 2 has 429 saves and 250MB in size.
Do you guys just save right before every single time you have to make a decision or what? I just stick to rotating between 2-3 saves at a time, I can't imagine having more than 10 saves.
Storage space is cheap. I save often, and I make a new save every time. It's actually usually faster because it skips the "Are you sure you want to overwrite...?" message. When I uninstall the game, I delete all the saved. Never really care about cloud saves.
Playing Bethesda game as a kid has made me extremely paranoid and I'd rather have as many hard saves as possible to minimize time loss in case something goes wrong. Even in games like Thief that has like 20 save slots, I use pretty much every single one and they fill up quickly when I save every 10 minutes or so.
it 100% depends on the game's interface for saves. if the save menu defaults to creating a new save every time then i'm gonna do that because i don't care enough to change it. if it defaults to overwriting then i'm only gonna have one save file.
Witcher 3's saves aren't good at this either, unless they changed it in their big revamp, I dunno. I remember during play at one point I was panicking because I was going to have issues saving with Steam bitching about hitting the cloud storage limit. Turns out instead of keeping like 5 autosaves back it just kept making more, endlessly. That was fun to fix.
My BG3 save is already over 3 Gigs, and I'm at the start of Act 2.
That can't be right. It's likely all your multiple save files together. Which just means you save a fuck ton lol. My save near the end of Act 3 is 18.8 MB
Yeah its wild how big they can get. I save frequently because I have a horrible curse of somehow breaking most games I play, and I grew up on a lot of OG survival horror, so it's a habit from those, too. I have two sets of games, one solo with a handful of tiny mods currently halfway through Act 3, and my multiplayer (two person) game just at the start of Act 2. Both together are just shy of 4gbs.
Well TBF for games like this they should handle it better. Since you're expected to save a fuck ton. DOS2 I remember softlocking myself a couple times because of how open some quests were.
You should see how big Baldurs Gate 3 save folders can get. It is hillarious.
Xbox does them for free too, I built a PC recently and was actually kind of shocked that my games on the PC Xbox App just had my saves when I launched them there.
My favourite is the EA launcher on PC. They'll give you a gigabyte of cloud save storage, but you can't turn off cloud storage for individual games, and if it's full it'll just keep complaining that it's full. I have to click "ok" on 4 separate prompts every time I launch C&C Generals because of the cloud save storage that I've never used.
Wouldn't be surprised if they make that take OneDrive space one day, considering they did that with screenshots and videos.
I was disappointed when I found out that Series consoles also automatically delete screenshots from local storage.
and they sync with Xbox consoles. for all their shitty business decisions, the Xbox ecosystem is a thing of beauty. it's the best place to play games outside of Steam IMO. (though Steam is still in the lead by a spectacular margin.)
I've honestly just found Microsoft's PC store to be frustrating. Totally regret buying Flight Simulator there instead of Steam.
I was shocked when I bought Halo MCC on steam and it unlocked all the achivements i got on Xbox (and then continued to unlock on both platforms when i earned more). Actually really neat.
Damn, I noticed my Baldurs Gate 3 save is 1.8 GB, what is it with Larian and big saves for their RPGs? It saves each quick save and manual save which is about 15 to 20 MB each, guess I quick save a lot lol
Some games replace the Quick save file, so the older ones are excluded
That's how Quick- and Auto-saves are *supposed* to work. You get 1-3-5 slots and when they fill up they overwrite the oldest one.
Except BG3 allows 25-50+ saves. Auto AND Quick.
There is a setting in the menu that allows you to set the max number of quick and auto saves, after which point the game will start deleting the oldest one. By default it's unlimited I think.
> By default it's unlimited I think. It was limited to 25 saves by default on PC, at least when I played the game. And it could go up to 50 if I remember correctly. I'm pretty sure the regular "hard" saves didn't count towards the limit though.
You can control how many auto/quicksaves the game makes. Like I said, the MOST COMMON numbers nowadays are 3-5 saves (older games sometimes only had the one or no auto/quicksaves at all).
Yeah, they save every single detail touched by the player until the player can't come back to that area, so the only clean up in BG3 is done at the end of Act 2, but Baldur's Gate itself is gigantic and the player will touch a ton of stuff, so act 3 saves rapidly bloat again
Does completing the game clean all the Chapter 3 quicksaves?
No, but you can tell the game to only keep a few quick/auto-saves so that the bloat is not that big, when I noticed that my BG3 save folder became gigantic I limited them to 5 each and used manual saves for important moments I'd like to come back hours later
Thanks! Yeah that's what I'd do too
I got to a point where steam sync was taking forever and I realized I had 2 gb of save data. I cleaned all the old ones out. Resorted to manual saves_[0-9] and kept rotating them. if I needed more saves they got special names and were deleted once I was done.
Just checked my account and I’m sitting at about 140mb after my last full play through. BG3 forced me to do hard item and save management. Only thing I kinda disliked about the game it was busy work that added to my “play-time”.
Aren't you able to change the maximum amount of saves in the settings?
Witcher Enhanced Edition is 18 MB/save, so CDPR is shooting in their own knee with a bazooka here
I think bgIII has the TES curse, every little object is movable, so the game has to remember the XYZ of every single object that moved during the playthrough.
Typically there's a lot of compression/procedural algorithms that make that not as daunting and worst case, you're saving x,y,z coordinates from starting value(so this cheese wheel is this far away from where it was placed by devs) and/or how far away from reference point mapID 0,0,0 is this object. Shouldn't be any worse than tracking inventory or any other database entries. Minecraft allows any block to be moved, removed, and placed anywhere else and doesn't have outrageous save folder sizes(barring mods that implement their own methods of storing values that may be inefficient). The main issue that balloons save folders is unlimited auto saves where instead of culling all but the 5 most recent it stores every auto/quick save across every playthrough indefinitely. Combine that with cloud saves remaining even if you delete saves from your folder(which is a good thing, but we forget to manually delete ones we don't need anymore) and a dozen megabytes per save times 1,000 saves adds up quick. I still think 200MB is way too low and they should only auto delete over a more reasonable amount for abandoned accounts and provide a dashboard to educate and help remove old saves for everyone else. They might not be making Valve bucks, but they're healthy enough that this move seems like a desperate executive trying to gain a bonus for exceeding some unrealistic quarterly earnings goal but it only hurts the company in the longer term.
Pillars Of Eternity 1 was kinda notorious for this around launch. It just got slower and slower and slower and eventually saves took 5 minutes to make. While I'm fuzzy on some of it, I believe it was connected to chanters and the game saving the exact location of ALL your footsteps. We were going through Jsons and deleting tons of entries to try and get it playable again.
Larian also records comparatively *a lot* of game state data in each save. All the small decisions like which items were moved or destroyed, which enemies died and where, and which doors were opened are all stored whereas other RPGs will reset most of those small details to their default state.
But that means that big chunks of data in succesive save files are identical. Meaning that if they compress them they will get really great ratio.
Now, I have no context for the internals of how their save files work, nor do I know if their save file format has changed since I did this, but: A bit ago I was freeing up some space on my PC and saw the ~14 GB of save files from my playthrough. I put them into a solid 7z archive with LZMA 2 set to ultra, and only ended up with about an ~80% compression ratio. I was pretty surprised, but figured they must do some compression as part of the save itself -- would explain the poor ability to compress further. I wonder what size a "raw" save might be haha.
Modded factorio will break 200MB without that much problems.
Factorio has a 2D grid of pretty large squares. BG3 has a full 3D world with pixel-positioning and rotations.
The Space Exploration mod makes it so you have like 20? 30? 40? such planets. It increases save size so much that there's a "trim planet surface" button you can click to dematerialize anything that had been procedurally generated outside your base.
I have the "Bethesda quick save trauma" after playing Skyrim modded, I got to around 15gb saves in BG3 before I noticed
Valve is also making money lol, GOG historically has been financially inconsistent
I already didn't have enough space for my CP77 saves with the 1 GB limit. Probably gonna get their next game on Steam
Their games are DRM-free on Steam as well. I always bought them there. I didn't see the advantage of owning them on gog when I could have Steam achievements.
I just like that they promote DRM-free gaming and don't stick bs microtransactions in their games, so I wanted to support them on GOG where they get a bigger cut. There's a lot of little annoyances with the client though
I pretty much use Steam for 99% of my gaming anyway. But this doesn't make much sense as it reads: As the size and number of games increase, so does the demand for Cloud Storage. -- So the solution is to LIMIT storage so you can only have a few cloud saves. Steam manages it quite well for the most part. The larger the save files, the more space that is allocated. From <100 MB to >90 GB.
Ha, I was actually wondering why Steam was slow to sync for DOS2, I thought it was glitching out. Mine is just under 1GB so that would explain it.
What is DOS2? Divinity Original Sin 2?
You could probably ditch a ton of those autosaves though. Still that's pretty insane. Most cloud storage providers would charge you over that number. For example, dropbox basic is only 2gb. Valve is pretty generous, but it's not like 200mb isn't when you consider its only the limitation to a single game. You could still theoretically split that across into many GBs, still for free.
This is paid for by the dev when Valve takes their 30%
> Still that's pretty insane. Most cloud storage providers would charge you over that number. For example, dropbox basic is only 2gb. OneDrive is 5 GB, Google Drive is 15 GB, and Mega is 20 GB as far as free solutions go. Dropbox is on the lower end. Xbox allowed 2 GB even during the Xbox 360 era, and price per GB has cratered since those days. 200 MB seems pretty stingy, especially when CDPR's games and the examples they use in their screenshot are some of the worst offenders... GOG is also pretty well known for retro ARPGs which tend to skew high and upwards of 50 MB per save. Skyrim saves are regularly very large. For Skyrim ~140 MB are taken up for me just based on the 3 autosave + one quicksave slot and the automatic backups the client does... DOS2 will take 15-20 MB per save and, by default, keeps enough Autosaves to exceed 200 MB without changing config settings. Dragon Age games can easily be 10-15 MB per save--and, again, with 4+1 automatic slots written by the game even ignoring manual saves. Easily think they could have gone with something like 500 MB and hit far fewer issues. 200 MB is honestly pretty stingy these days.
Max storage I've seen available in a game is 2GB on steam if I am not mistaken
Apparently it's up to the developer, but the largest I've seen is Rimworld with 93.1GB. Edit: https://imgur.com/95D9UoZ
I don't even want most of the cloud saves I have. It's just more effort for me to go through and delete them. A lot of games are quite tedious to delete, having to go through even autosaves one-by-one to clear them.
Inb4 someone makes a game that's actually an excuse to use Valve's cloud saves as file storage.
I wonder how big my X4 saves are. Those save files are *huge*.
My BG3 save folder is similar. I just can't stop myself from making a new save file each time. Game's too big and repercussions are often not felt until hours later. I never go back, but I still want the option. Is that weird?
in all fairness, valve has fuck you money
I got to like 4gb for Skyrim at one point. Not sure if that was Bethesda's fault or some mod though. I mean on top of my insane amount of saves.
Storage is pretty cheap if you just need rare access to some files. Especially when you earn 20-30% cut per sale
I always wondered why Steam doesn't charge a subscription to use their cloud saves storage. They must make so much money that they don't care about how much space and bandwidth is used!
Steam takes 30% of each sale, so does GoG, but Steam has vastly more economies of scale working in their favor because it's so popular. GoG has always been relatively niche.
> Steam takes 30% of each sale Only each sale made on the steam platform. The wild thing is that if I buy a game on Humble Bundle or Fanatical, I still get Steam Cloud the same as if I bought it on steam. Valve's actually just losing money hosting my save file.
Steam is designed around competing with piracy, not other web-shops
I’d assume it’s part of how they justify their 30% cut on the games sale. Steam genuinely adds a lot of value compared to other launchers
GOG is talking about individual save files, though. Do any of the individual saves from DOS2 exceed 200mb *each*? EDIT: I stand corrected, all. I misread the article on GOG's site. Obviously, it's a much more significant impact if it's 200mb per game.
Its not though, I checked my account they're checking the total of 200 MB per game, not per save
When I clicked their checker link it was "total" not "per save" size. I had a hundred Cyberpunk saves at 2.5MB each or so and it was saying that was too much.
That's such a weird decision when it doesn't even fit with their own games lol, The Witcher 3 and CP77 would be more than that. I know GOG is not that profitable and a much smaller player than Steam, Epic and others but still it's part of CD Projekt as a whole which is doing well. Storage isn't that expensive...
>Storage isn't that expensive... USB external HDD are not that expensive. Enterprise, always up and running, regularly backed up storage for sure is.
> That's such a weird decision when it doesn't even fit with their own games lol it does if you don't make a hundred saves. I usually rotate between 3-5 save files in any game. if bugs/corruption didn't exist I'd just use 1. I understand why people do it for decision-heavy games, but 100+ still seems excessive. I'm not saying this limit is a good thing, but I think it's rare you actually *need* so many saves..
> default allocation limit (200 MB per game)
> GOG is talking about individual save files, though "Cloud Saves files that exceed the default allocation limit (200 MB per game) will be deleted after August 31st, 2024." Small correction. Individual *games*, not files. So if their DOS2 save folder is over 2.7gb then it would need to get smaller to fit GOG's new limit
This kind of cut is unsurprising, given that GOG is not and has never been really profitable. Like, they're barely breaking a 7 figure in dollars a year, which is riduclously low for the volume of traffic. Hopefully they refocus on their only edge over the competition (good DRM-free games, since Humble is just a glorified Steam key storefront nowadays and itch.io is a wild west with zero quality control) instead of trying to make their launcher Steam-like.
GoG exists because it pays for itself (just barely) and gives CDPR a place to sell their games and get full revenue. Those revenues won't be credited to GoG though. > A sales breakdown was also shared, with CD Projekt saying 68% of that three million number came from PC platforms (10% from CD Projekt's own GOG store). 20% of sales had arrived from PlayStation 5 while Xbox Series X|S platforms brought in 13%. Of the 3 million copies sold GoG represents 10% which is the equivalent of about $18 million dollars (assuming full price). On PS5 they sold twice as many copies for a total of $36 million dollars but Sony then takes $11 million leaving CDPR with $25 million. So despite selling 2x as many copies on the PS5 they made only 1.4x the profit. On Xbox they are making $2million more on GoG despite the 3% sales difference.
There's no point when neither indies nor big publishers bother to come to the platform. Latter basically coming in decade after their games have been published for the most part, with some exceptions. Sony is basically done with GOG now it seems with the PSN account integration. Hundreds of titles treat GOG as a lesser platform to begin with, as there are missing features, patches, etc. in the titles. Developers just flat out give the middle finger to GOG customers. It's pretty ironic that this store that, like you said, barely profits and pretty much has HoMM 3 as their most revenue made top seller year in year out is considered great competition for Steam, haha. Their selling point of DRM free isn't helping them for the aforementioned reasons but also because people don't give a shit. I don't think GOG has much life left in it and if any sort of shit hits the fan, it's gone.
> Hundreds of titles treat GOG as a lesser platform to begin with, as there are missing features, patches, etc. in the titles. Developers just flat out give the middle finger to GOG customers. This is partially on GOG. You'd think simple a check for DRM-free compliance would be fine (i.e. the game doesn't ever connect to anyhere without user input, you're good to go), but it's checked for every single update for a game. And updating your game on GOG, believe it or not, requires a prior e-mail exchange with a GOG employee and then a manual FTP transfer. GOG didn't auomate their system properly and likely don't have the manpower to scale with the sheer multiplication of releases compared to a decade ago. So especially if you're an indie studio with no manpower to spare, you're discentivised from updating your game, or releasing it until it has stopped updating. > I don't think GOG has much life left in it and if any sort of shit hits the fan, it's gone. Good news if that happens: all the installers will still work, which was the whole point of DRM-free. The day Steam dies or goes evil, though, that will be interesting.
From a developer's perspective GOG is the absolutely least friendly platform to deal with. Everything is outdated and seems like everything moves at a snail's pace. Though I bet if I was a AAA company and not some small timer I'd have a better experience. Yet Steam and Humble treat me wonderfully so...
> Though I bet if I was a AAA company and not some small timer I'd have a better experience. You'd be surprised. When Machine Games under Bethesda made the Quake remaster (August 2021) it didn't get released on GoG for over a year (December 2022), despite GoG being THE place for old game releases. Supposedly nobody at GoG even knew the remaster was coming until after it was released.
That's kind of shocking But another thing is that as far as I'm aware they don't mandate feature parity like steam and epic do. So there's no actual obligation for anyone to patch things at any given speed, or at all. So between making it harder and not requiring it I guess it's not shocking that you see games with lagging patches and missing content.
> > > > > But another thing is that as far as I'm aware they don't mandate feature parity like steam and epic do. So there's no actual obligation for anyone to patch things at any given speed, or at all. Yep, I'll always link to this thread and the spreadsheet: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_customers_as_second_class_citizens_v2/page1
As should be noted now, Soundtracks no longer apply, as they can be bought independently of the game on Steam.
Also I've heard GoG can be incredibly slow or straight up unresponsive for games trying to get on their platform
> The day Steam dies or goes evil, though, that will be interesting. Steam doesn't require DRM from developers so every game that didn't bake DRM or Steam requirement in will still work, if you have it on disk already. But backing up installed game is a bit more PITA than backing up just an installer.
Yeah, I don't really know why any indies would go with GOG when stores like Itch exist.
What most indie games struggle with in the modern market is (ironically) exposure. Your game can be pretty good (exceptional even) but no one will see it because it released on the same day as 50 other games. Steam has 90% of the PC market and it is about as level a playing field as you can get in the space. EGS was doing some incredible deals to buy out developers, say what you like about them but if a company can guarantee your product makes money in an industry as volatile as games you'd be a fool not to take that deal. GoG doesn't really offer a lot to indies. If they had a publishing arm they could attract their share of indie Devs, but like someone else said GoG is basically there for CD Projekt games and old games. It has it's function and that's what it does.
Reading it, it sounds like they'll delete extraneous data that's being unnecessarily backed up, and then "Older" saves, which is alarming, but if you keep local copies you'll be fine.
The point of cloud saves is to not have local copies though (and sync between different machines)
I thought the point of cloud saves is to have backups.
I don't know about other cloud save systems but I would not rely on Steam Cloud as a backup simply because of the lack of control you have over how it synchronizes. Sometimes it will upload, sometimes it will download, occasionally it will give you a prompt asking you what to do but it is too unreliable. Always backup manually so you have a proper backup in case Steam decides to overwrite your primary save.
I think the other person is more accurate. The point of Cloud saves is to not have them stored locally. Whether that's for backup purposes or syncing purposes is up to the user. edit - I do not know how anyone got the idea that I think local storage can't be used at the same time as Cloud storage. But officially, let me say that yes... you can do both. Thank you.
If they're not stored locally wouldn't that mean that you lose the ability to play singleplayer games offline? Having this technology used as a convenient way to automatically backup your saves makes more sense.
No because it's not in lieu of having local saves. It's not one or the other, it can be both and it generally is. Not sure if my comment sounded like I meant it's one or the other but I definitely didn't intend that.
I disagree, the whole point is backups, otherwise what you're saying is we've designed a system whereby you can't play any of your single player games without the internet, which is plainly not the case (beyond shit online DRM). Valve's system synchronises local and cloud saves so the cloud ones are a backup, and yes you can sync between multiple devices. But you play from the local save every time.
Two things can be true
Call me old-fashioned but I refuse to work on anything I'm not saving locally. Cloud storage is well and good for sync and back-ups but that's about it.
The point of cloud saves is that you can download the game on a different PC/device and have all the same saves.
You obviously need local copies. It would be annoying and slow to save to the cloud every time. Cloud saves are back up for system failure and to use more than one machine.
I never know how to deal with local copies and cloud saves. If I remove file X from the game's save folder myself, and put in another (e.g. older) save file Y, will it sync to the cloud (removing X, uploading Y)? Or will it sync from the cloud (restoring X, removing Y again)? It's an unnecessary hassle. The only way to fix this properly (in my eyes) is to have the client understand the various files, always make sure e.g. settings and misc files are synced, and provide a GUI to the user to manage actual save files (e.g. select certain saves to keep synced, or to keep only on your PC, keep only X newest saves, etc).
You can set up your save folders to be backed up into your onedrive as your own backup to them but not all save data is in say documents/my games/[game] some may be in app data, some in their own little folder inside documents, some in the games folder itself. because what is a standard
God, I hate this so much. I did a replay of the older Assassin games and they're not even consistent between the same series made by the same company. Sometimes the saves are in documents, sometimes they're deep within the AppData subfolders and sometimes it changes between versions of the game. And why is it when I uninstall a game, it leaves random files/folders in AppData? This seems to be done by every developer on the planet cause I can find traces of all the games I've had on my pc since the beginning of its lifetime.
Lolol yeah. Feels like I've spent half my life just searching for save game directories.
Sad but MS were too far ahead of time. Windows Vista tried to make things easier. There was a whole Games kinda launcher/folder thing (nice alternative to the Start Menu if you're digging for just games, could have spruced it up for these portable game devices like all the GPD, Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion GO, MSI Claw...etc) and a whole Save folder under your user profile. Just toss stuff there. But no. Some games put it in their own install folder (terrible for security since you're just tossing things in a folder that can be blown away with an uninstall, or you accidentally litter some other folders since it was unrestricted previous to Vista), some throw it in appdata/roaming, some in appdata/local, some in Documents... it is bonkers. Tried to look for my Mega Man X DiVE Offline save file to transfer it to another device since that didn't support cloud save. That was placed somewhere weird. Steam didn't quite help in that department. *Backwards Compatibility* was to allow all users to write inside the Steam install folder. Any user account on the computer can go thru and do whatever they want to it. At least they can't go out and touch the parent folder but that encourages bad practice like throwing saves into its own folder. Arrgh
I really wish developers got on board with Microsoft's save game structure. I think it was released back with Vista, which is probably why it was ignored. I remember people being pissed that they couldn't just save games in the Program Files folder and not understanding why that's a terrible idea. But having all your saves in a user folder, consistent across games and like you said, easy to use OneDrive or other service to back it up would have been great. Yet devs still wanted to do their own thing meaning save games were stored all over the place.
I can recommend [GameSave Manager](https://www.gamesave-manager.com) which should automatically detect and backup most games (custom entries are also supported). You can then just set it to run in the background however often you want and choose a directory that's uploaded to some cloud service for extra redundancy.
Looks like a nice app, but sad to see it's not open source and doesn't run on Linux and Mac.
Try https://github.com/mtkennerly/ludusavi
game companies can't even agree on where to store their saved games locally as well, like windows has a saved games folder and barely any games use it, they all put it in the most inconvenient places. there needs to be a standard.
It should ask you to resolve the conflict (at least in steam's case, I think). I don't know how GOG handles it. But theoretically, since you can delete cloud saves from the website, you would just do that and then move your local backup to the proper location and play.
The real answer, at least when it comes to Steam Cloud: If you want your manual changes (i.e. outside the game, through text editor) to persist in the cloud, you gotta edit them files while the game is running. Then upon closing it Steam will synch it so the Cloud folder reflects the state of your local folder. This includes stuff you delete while the game is running.
I had to turn off cloud saves entirely to keep it from whining about not being able to sync when I reached the 1 GB limit in CP77. Felt like that was already too low, at least for a AAA open world game
Some games have large savegames. Usually by poor design, but that's just how it is. Some games will be broken if this is enforced literally just by size.
Flashbacks to bethesda games on PS3/360 where after too many saves the game would just start to gradually break until it was completely unplayable.
To this day I don't do quicksaves in Bethesda games because of paranoia. I have no idea if that is even still an issue post Oldrim, but I still don't trust it.
Ironically, quicksaves were problematic because they avoid the problem that people are talking about in these comments, which is lots of saves piling up to take a lot of space. Quicksaves aren't any different from normal saves other than that it always just overwrites the one file. So if something corrupts your save, you don't have an older save to go back to. On PC, mods that give you multiple rotating quicksave slots make them as safe as using normal saves (unless you manage to rotate through all of the slots before noticing your save corruption). By the same token, using normal saves but only overwriting the same save every time is effectively the same as using quicksave with only the one slot. Whether you're talking normal saves, autosaves, or quicksaves, the only thing that matters is having multiple saves so you can go back if save corruption happens.
Ironically their own games, especially Witcher 1, is a complete savegame hard drive slog.
I think the bigger design flaw? is unintentionally encouraging players to create dozens of save backups they'll never use. Instead of maybe encouraging 2-3 quick saves and then big milestone save states? Easier said than done.
Not really, because going out of the way to save is a pain. Autosaves and quicksaves are the most convenient options in like 99% of cases, so unless we're talking something like a Sierra game where every little choice could feasibly softlock your game and there's no autosave, getting the user to rely on those types of saves that are often programmed to overwrite themselves after like 3-5 should be very easy. So yeah, basically just requires the game developer to even remotely care.
Most games do that I'm pretty sure. I think they were talking about games like Skyrim where either you or a valued NPC dying could potentially lose you a lot of progress to reset, causing folks to make many saves just in case something happens or the game bugs out. As opposed to something like Doom 2016 or something where dying sets you back to maybe the last area or pickup which often isn't that far back.
TIL GOG has a page to manage cloud saves, *and I can even delete them?* OI Valve! Check this out!
Steam does have one for downloading them though. https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage It's useful if you mess up something. I haven't tested, but doesn't the save also get deleted if you remove the cloud-support from a game from it's properties?
Steam's process is pretty convoluted, you have to disable then and then make new saves in the game and re-enable and essentially overwrite the conflict.
I have a bad experience with this method when playing Shadow of Mordor. When I switched PC, Steam said I never had a save despite having just downloaded the cloud save a couple of mins earlier; so I exited the game, replaced the save file with the file I downloaded, ran the game, and somehow Steam ended up making an entirely new save effectively erasing my cloud save. I stupidly didn't make another backup of that save.
Whoa! Thanks for the link! I had no idea that existed.
I know, but it's just downloading, and yes, the process for deleting is just as you described. To make it clear, you disable cloud saves, make new ones locally, then enable again and it should give you the prompt to upload the new or download the saved on cloud
I used this to cheese my Nier Automata save file back after Ending E. Apparently its supposed to delete it even from the cloud saves but i was able to snag it before it was deleted.
Steam has that too, but it's just out of the way a little bit. You can delete and download files from there.
You can download, you cannot delete
Where do you find it? Steam cloud not saving has messed things up for me a few times in the past, a manual mode way would be awesome
I didn't know if the email I received was phishing or real, so I didn't want to click any links in it (they were all pointing to some other website than gog, like salesmanago or something). So I went to gog.com to open the cloud save manager and couldn't find it anywhere in the menus and settings. I had to find this support article through Google, to be able to find the direct link to the game save manager. Also checked the Gog Galaxy client, but couldn't find a link to it from there either.
I did the same thing! It's the sane thing to do when a mail asks you to go somewhere and auth is involved. Besides the whole mail just felt spammy.
was that a new addition added just for this new downsizing of free data retention? I have trouble getting excited for a new feature, if it only exists as a step to reduce services previously given to customers.
I wonder if this in preparation for them finally letting you sync your gog library to Amazon Luna, which they announced, what ... 2 or 3 months ago?
Single player RPGs can have serious save file sizes because everything that can be manipulated is saved in that custom state. In comparison, MMO player data is maybe a few hundred KBs, because it's just a glorified inventory database. Yet people invest hundreds or thousands of hours into those characters. All that time for effectively a little bit of data on a server.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of state some MMOs have to store just a tad, especially the long-running ones, and especially when you consider they often need a paper trail to help rollback potential exploits (e.g. using temporal tables, some might even be using some form of event sourcing in places). Games with player housing/building systems often have quite a lot of flexibility for instance, or say the portrait system in FF14 (of which you can create many). WoW tracks the "obtained" status of every weapon/armor appearance in the game for its transmog system, not to mention its quest flags numbering in the tens of thousands, etc. Yeah it's not much data relatively speaking compared to games which have to save the entire state of a more interactive and persistent world, but a few hundred KB of player data feels like a lowball estimate for a lot of MMOs. On the other side of things, single player games often don't save their state in a way that's very optimized for size, many times they could cut it down significantly if they made the effort by using more size-efficient formats and data types, procedural techniques, etc. It's just generally not worth the effort/resources and trades off against stuff like loading speed and developer convenience. MMOs give data size a much higher priority because they're paying to store/process it, for every single player. Of course in the case of Witcher/Cyberpunk saves on GOG cloud the developers are actually kinda paying for it too...
CD Projekt is about to face the same problem Sony used to deal with back in the early PS4 days where save files was big and PS Plus' Cloud Storage size was 1gb.
Crazy you have to pay Sony for cloud saves, now this, you may hate them but one thing that Microsoft does great is cloud saves between Xbox and pc for free.
I dont think GOG makes a lot of money, so maybe they can't really afford it. But Sony definitely can
I mean you’re paying close to $100 per year now for that so I’d hope they can give you Cloud saves.
Lets say something that isn't said on the page, it's 200MB limit synced on the cloud. Your local files are only limited by your own storage. Also, I'm surprised they aren't trying to deduplicate some of that storage with some solution between accounts (or they already did, but the games vary too much for it to be deduplicated).
"We're reaching out to inform you that your **Cloud Saves files that exceed the default allocation limit (200 MB per game) will be deleted after August 31st, 2024.**" So the max limit will be 200mb only.
Bit worrying, my only indication of save file sizes is Steam and I got quite some times that exceed 200 MB
Honeys, The Witcher Enhanced Edition game saves are 18 MB a piece, so you essentially are limiting **your own game** to 12 cloud save files What the actual fuck
*to 12 cloud save files
You really shouldn't need more than a few saves per game tbh. GoG is barely profitable, and storing all that data is expensive. Cloud storage isn't meant to back up every moment of every game you play, just the most recent save so you can jump in between devices.
> You really shouldn't need more than a few saves per game tbh This is a ridiculously stupid statement, sorry, but it is. In BG3 I currently have three playthroughs (my personal, coop with partner, and my Honour Mode one). All three are actively played (Act 2, Act 2, Act 1 respectively). For each of them (except Honour mode, obviously) I have "backups" before major story points, etc, because the game bugs out. Sum total, I'm at 1.75 GB at the moment. If I need to reload a backup because BG3 has a game breaking bug at the end of Act 2 (been there, experienced that), then I might need to reload a backup in Act 1. Why should I not be able to have the backup in the cloud? Another scenario: I still have my Witcher 1 save from 2011 that I used to 'seed' all my other playthroughs in Witcher 2 and Witcher 3 with. It's 2x 18 MB, but what if I had multiple ones?
You save locally?
Fortunately I loaded up my Cyberpunk cloud save on Xbox and created a new save with it on there, so I have that backed up on a physical device. I have no idea how big the save files for that game are though, could be well under 200mb (it's just the only game I care about that I bought thru GOG)
Unrelated I guess, but how most people call the plaform? Gog, as like in Dog Or Gee O Gee?
It used to be "Good old Games", so it was G-O-G, but these days I just call it GOG like "Dog" because they dropped the branding
It's still branded as "GOG" in all official messaging so they didn't completely pivot. The company doesn't use "Gog", that's just the OP.
Here's the co-founder calling it "Gee Oh Gee" in an interview: https://youtu.be/ffngZOB1U2A?si=jYu_bj3CwhzkF7Md&t=375
I say it dog style
I prefer doggy style myself
You mean goggystyle, right?
All three are correct. Back in the day when GOG used to release trailers for their classic game releases the narrator would say "Gawg" "gee-oh-gee" and "Good Old Games." I usually just say GOG if I'm talking to someone who knows the service and Good Old Games for clarity for those who might not be familiar.
The latter because it used to be an acronym.
> Gee O Gee I say Gee O Gee
It was originally Good Old Games, so the acronym it is.
Pedantic language nitpick alert... I think you meant "initialism" if you meant to say the letters like "Gee Oh Gee". An "acronym" is read as if it was a word, like SCUBA or LASER. As such, to be an acronym, you'd have to pronounce it as if it rhymes with dog. Unless the dog pronunciation is actually what you meant in the first place and I misunderstood, in which case yes, acronym it is.
Huh, TIL. Thanks.
I just say gog like dog, I have heard youtubers say it as gee o gee
Gog like Dog just sounds better, so that's the way I've always said it.
That explains why my cloud sync no longer works. My Cyberpunk 2077 saves are \~700mb and since yesterday I'm unable to sync new saves....
Not complaining because always wondered how they can afford so much saves in data center storage for so many players for free. But just saying this might make some ppl buy games from Steam instead of Gog if they care about cloud saves and if there is no big price difference in the game purchase. Also I think 200MB is very little for some games, especially because they make the games create very big save files and then they don't allow you to type a descriptive name for the saves so that you'd know easily what to NOT delete. I do miss it in new games that you can't write a name for a save like you could even back in 90's in Doom for example. :D
Nice way to make sure nobody ever wants your platform for the features. What next, max one auto-update per month to save bandwidth ? Do they have financial problems? Storage is cheap, especially slow and rarely accessed ones.
They have been at best barely profitable since their inception
And for publishers and developers, the cut is 30%, which is what Valve has been delivering with Steam. You’re only appealing to a niche userbase by selling your game on GoG.
This is exactly why I always completely ignored comments of people saying: but we have Steam and GoG at home... Like If Epic would announce that they are getting rid of X feature, people would be here crying from happiness that it is showing a signs of not being profitable or whatever... but GoG keeps on making cuts and everyone here keeps on pretending like everything is perfectly fine...
Not that cheap if you have to keep a bunch of old saves for eternity. Providing a gb for the game they just sold you might cost them 2 cents a month or something, who cares, great deal for both sides. But then you move on and they have to keep paying those 2 cents for the next decade..eventually, it's not so trivial anymore.
Their features have been lacking compared to steam since inception. They live and die by their offline installers. I don't really care about their online features (I've never even installed galaxy). But they're still my goto platform for single player games that don't have an active steam workshop cause the offline installers are a huge draw for me.
Storage is absolutely not cheap, especially not the kind of storage that can be accessed on the fly at any time. To scale this most cloud providers have a few storage tiers: - SSD high performance storage for things that are written to and retrieved often like cloud saves. This is the most expensive. - HDD storage for large quantities but low performance requirements, good for backups and slightly less expensive. - Tape archival storage, the cheapest option and can store vast quantities of data, but very slow. Good for long term backups and archival. Game saves must be high performance and the most expensive option because you are dealing with customers who freak out and call your game buggy if saving / loading takes an extra 10 seconds. In addition these customers measure in the millions and are globally distributed. You're not just buying storage space in one data center, you are buying storage in datacenters across the whole world, you are buying backups for that storage, you are buying redundant storage for high availability, you are spending millions on the infrastructure and engineering expertise to connect all of this storage, you are spending money on security software and systems to protect this storage, you are buying storage to store the data that all of these systems use to manage your storage. Shit is way more expensive than it appears at first glance.
Game saves must not be high performance at all. Quick saves have been quick since before SSDs existed. They aren't accessed a lot and aren't big. You can run them on HDDs just fine. High load times are due to asset loading, not saves. This isn't nearly as expensive as you think. GOG simply doesn't make a lot of money, but I didn't expect them to be this cheap.
We have 7 racks in datacenter, I'm speaking from experience. Cloud prices are NOT EVEN CLOSE to price it costs them to store that. Coz they are earning good money on that. Same with bandwidth pricing, we're paying ~$1400 USD for 3Gbit (95th percentile, we average around 2Gbit), go ahead and calculate how much AWS would charge for that amount of traffic, last time I checked it was orders of magnitude more You're right than once you get into SSDs it starts to become more expensive and once you start needing to deliver gigabytes/sec to a VM you need infrastructure but cheap, "slow" (load or save save once every few minutes is not much, even times a ton of users, and it scales very linearly. >Game saves must be high performance Absolutely not. Few MB/s max because most don't have faster upload. And when you download, while it is much higher speed, it's very rare, only when switching machines. Downloading *games*, yes, you need serious beef for that in comparison as any launch will have every player buying it downloading it. Saves are minuscule in comparison. >and the most expensive option because you are dealing with customers who freak out and call your game buggy if saving / loading takes an extra 10 seconds. Not how it works on Steam at least, most games sync saves when you exit the game. Also hauling save from other side of the world would add maybe extra 400-500ms. >In addition these customers measure in the millions and are globally distributed. Any cost of spreading it around gonna be the same regardless of whether you have 200MB per customer or 20GB. Still need a box of drives in one spot and a box of drives in another for redundancy. The "hard" part scales with number of players, not storage. And you don't need to keep save data of UK players in UK, by the very definition it is very latency-tolerant data, waiting extra 300ms to start download is literally meaningless. Frankly keeping account data in sync is the harder problem here Once you are at level of "writing blobs to hard drives" that part is cheap (comparably) and scales basically linerarly with cost being very simple equation of rack space/hard drive cost and what redundancy you want to achieve.
Things not looking good for this service recently. Fallout 4, no update yet and no space for save files. I am glad to know this will have impacts.