Saving Games On-Line?

[sir doris]

Now, I don't know if this is in the pipeline, or even already kinda possible with the current consoles but it seem like a great idea for gamers.

Wouldn't it be a neat idea if instead of using memory cards you could simply save games to your PS3/ XBox 360 bradband web space? and maybe store your account details on a memory card? With games like GT you could save loads of replays and photos etc. When you go round your friends house just take you memory card and you've got access to all your save games and anything else you've saved

Is anything like this likely? I suppose it might mean a slump in memory card sales for the manufactuers but it would be a cool feature!

 

[rabidrabbit]

I think technically it would be easy to do, but I'm not sure the console manufacturers are too keen on that idea as there is no money for them in it, only costs for keeping up the servers that store the game data.
With Live type subscription it might be, but for as a free service, unlikely.

 

[Ty]

Naturally pc online games do this already (MMOs) so it's no big deal. Heck, even consoles with an online component save some data about their users (account info, etc.) so really, it's no big deal technically.

Even space isn't such a huge issue imo as save data or character data tends to be very very small for the vast majority of games (unlike in SWG where the character DB is around 2-3megs per character)

I would worry more about writing out a save and the connection drops and the problems that could fall out from that.

 

[sir doris]

I would have thought that these days when free-e-mail accounts can have hundreds of Mbs of storage if you had a sub like XBox Live! it would be a worth while option. If each game for the platform had the option to use web space you could then choose to use memory cards or web. You could even back up you memory cards to your web space.

I understand that current multiplayer games use some form of on-line save but I was thinking using on-line storage more like how memory cards are used today. Maybe also be able to use it to store MP3's to play in the background when playing off-line (or even on-line if there is enough bandwidth) games like the XBox can from it's hard disk? You could also store pictures taken with eye toy like devises?

 

[rabidrabbit]

Yes, and those content you buy with "microtransactions", you'd only buy the permission to download it whenever and a specified amount of times. That content, like extra levels, characters, weapons... that would be the same for everybody, unlike game saves. That content would not be saved to your personal webspace, but it would always reside in the developer's serverspace. Even music could be streamed from a central server(s).

So even a 200Meg - 0,5Gig personal webspace would not be way too small, as you'd only really need to store there the really personalized data like your own photos, game saves, music not bought from MS store etc...

 

[London Geezer]

Well, today you can already get gigabytes of free webspace (gmail is one example, i have more than one address so that's a lot of space on the web all for free), so i think it can easily be done considering we'll be paying for this.