20 ms·

Ghost recon breakpoint game save disappeared

160 points by rexbee 4y ago

danielrpa 4y ago
Does Stadia still exist? When it's on the news, it's always something negative.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bigmattystyles 4y ago
I wonder if there is a mentality that ‘meh these are just game saves, big whoop’ as opposed to say Google docs. Hopefully data is data.
- tetha 4y ago
  It would be a rather dangerous precedent if they don't care about the save games. On some games, the world / game save file can have hundreds of hours invested into it. If they were just like "well sucks, we might lose it, eh", it'd say something about using stadia.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    > it'd say something about using stadia. It'd say that Google is not serious about Stadia, long-term. Which was already known when they announced it for the first time, so not a lot of loss there. This is very likely just a bug they'll fix soon though, at least I certainly hope so for the players' sakes.
  - smueller1234 4y ago
    I can tell you that the stadia team don't look at it like that at all. I've worked on storage, I know their storage system design, and I've discussed it with the SRE team in the past. I'm not involved in any of the ongoing and wouldn't comment on it. Came here to assert that this team is neither stupid nor callous.
    - influx 4y ago
      Ok, when this issue was escalated did that team get paged in to work on a potential data loss issue? If not, I’m concerned. I’ve worked at storage at scale too, and this is standard practice.
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    Would be a big red flag if Stadia would be losing save games. If I'd have invested 100+ hours into a game and it would be lost-> seriously annoyed.
- avereveard 4y ago
  Hopefully they just waiting for the support team timezone and it's just a matter of clicking restore on their storage at whatever point in time prior to the erasure These are paying customers after all, surely they won't go around without backups. Imagine the image damage from something like that.
  - meetups323 4y ago
    > support team timezone Profit generating services at FAANG's pay good money for engineers to be woken up in the middle of the night to fix whatever problems might arise. It's been over 24 hours. There is a serious bug, and the backups aren't working as expected. Hugs to the SRE's.
- RachelF 4y ago
  Take a look on the Google Docs/Drive support forums. Google loses people's data quite often.
M4v3R 4y ago
This is what can and will happen if we decide it’s a good idea to rent games instead of owning them. Same with always online games - at some point the developers can and will shutdown the servers, rendering your game unplayable. It already happened several times. I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Did they shut down these servers?
- turtledove 4y ago
  I hear this, and I respect it, but I'll offer a different perspective: Media is transient, it's ephemera. We will remember the big names but forget the small things. There's more media being produced than I could consume in a lifetime, so if something disappears I can move on to the next thing. I find that experiencing media in the moment is part of the allure - this is something happening now and it's something I'm interested in now. That's not to say we shouldn't have archives and history, but letting go of my collection has been a huge weight off my back.
  - rektide 4y ago
    I don't get this kind of callous, tough-love, blow-up-your-memories sell. There's nothing about any of this that looks like a ticking time bomb. Everything was fine until one day some part of the world around us unceremoniously disappeared, for no real ascertainable reason, in a way totally beyond most peoples control. This is shit. Unqualifiedly just shit. Good for you that you feel free & clear for casting off the past, but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have, for no real reason, self-destructed.
    - Kbelicius 4y ago
      > but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have unceremoniously self-destructed. It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs. Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
wolverine876 4y ago
This could serve as a good example to aspiring developers and system administrators of the value and sanctity of user data. > Over 600 hours on 2 different characters. Both with 250 XP and at level 70 and 72. GONE!!!!!!! Imagine their data is gone for good. What compensation could the vendor possibly provide? Would $10,000 do it? User data can be irreplaceable.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  For a game? Arguably, any "damages" suffered by folks who lost data here would be limited to the amount they paid in order to play the game. You could go even further down that route and say that the game probably provides at least as much entertainment value as seeing a feature film in a theater. Since the average movie ticket cost is somewhere around $10 and the average feature film runs between 75 and 210 minutes (both according to some quick Google searches), you could say the players already got ~$3/hour in value simply from playing already. Sure, this seems like a silly exercise, but, I could imagine it getting parsed out in a similar manner should the discussion of compensation turn serious.
  - dmos62 4y ago
    The player did not lose 600 hours of entertainment, so I don't think that the movie comparison works. This seems similar to burning your photo album. There might have been an emotional attachment, and a significant non-financial investment, but how do you translate either of those into money? Eye for an eye, maybe?
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      No, they did not lose 600 hours of entertainment. That's the point. They lost at most what they paid to play the game. They received back 600 hours of entertainment, making their net loss equal to: $COST_TO_PLAY - $HOURS_PLAYED * $ENTERTAINMENT_VALUE_PER_HOUR_PLAYED My suspicion is that for any reasonable values of the above variables, that loss is going to end up negative for most players. In other words, the appropriate compensation here is zip, zero, nada for most people. Even if you factor in emotional attachment, for an emotionally healthy individual, the value of a few days feeling like "oh, damn, that really sucked" probably isn't much, either. In fact, I'd say it's probably zero here, too, since most people will just get over it without any help or external cost to themselves. At least that's what I imagine my lawyer telling me if I called up with a story about how some internet gaming company lost my data. In actual fact, they'd probably just tell me I had no case, then laugh about me after hanging up the phone.
Aloha 4y ago
Judging by the number of people impacted and the comments it looks like a bug. I'm not seeing a resolution yet.
tjpnz 4y ago
People are going to lose more than their save games when Google inevitably kills Stadia.
- leach 4y ago
  I love stadia but it’s been on my mind that it may be dead for a while now. I guess I’d just buy a pixel with the refund they give me if it’s Google credit
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  I didn’t realise stadia was still a thing…
  - number6 4y ago
    It's all GeforceNow now...
- floucky 4y ago
  But can Google kill it? Many people bought their games, there must be a law that prevent that... Right?
  - Cwizard 4y ago
    Not too long ago Microsoft closed their ebook platform. The books all had DRM so would stop working when Microsoft shutdown it’s servers. They gave everyone a full refund for all their books I think.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    It's Google... of course they can.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
influx 4y ago
Use Google products at your own risk.
- rob74 4y ago
  Use any cloud product (or, even more generally, any product where you don't have full control over your data, e.g. because of DRM) at your own risk.
josephcsible 4y ago
How many times does stuff like this have to happen before people stop trusting the cloud (i.e., someone else's computer) as the only place where data they care about lives?
- onion2k 4y ago
  I think it's significantly more likely that these people's game saves will be restored than if their local saves were lost. People are woefully uninformed, and often quite lazy, about backup strategies, especially if they play games on consoles. When you use a cloud service backups and restore becomes someone else's problem that they're paid to do well. The main problem for these people will be whether Google and Ubisoft consider it a big enough problem to bother fixing.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    > The main problem for these people will be whether Google and Ubisoft consider it a big enough problem to bother fixing. It's this lack of control that keeps me gaming locally and saving games locally. My save game backup strategy is mostly non-existent, I focus on just things I create like code or writing or pictures or videos. I've lost saves before through my own stupidity and I'll curse the gods for a few minutes and start a new character or whatever or decide it's a great time to try a new game. If some company decides my lost save is not worth retrieving or I get banned for who knows what reason or they just turn off the servers one day, that's when I'll feel the pain for a long time and curse them for a lot longer than I would curse the gods or myself.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > How many times does stuff like this have to happen before people stop trusting the cloud (i.e., someone else's computer) as the only place where data they care about lives? Most of the people don't have viable alternatives to this. I've actually written about some ways how you supposedly can do backups of your own data in relatively simple ways: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/simple-ways-to-do-backups https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/simple-ways-to-do-backups And yet, almost all of my IRL friends don't do backups. They don't care, or don't have the time/knowledge for redundancy of their data. So, for most of them, using Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever is going to be a far more reliable way of storing their data, seeing as very few people get banned from these platforms and lose everything. I am yet to meet someone else in person who has their own Nextcloud or ownCloud instance running. Even if they cared to do that, once again, for the majority of average people out there working with servers is out of the question, somehow everyone knows how to use a smartphone but not how to install Debian on an old PC and run a Docker image (at least without setting a bad password for the database and accidentally exposing it to the world).
ars 4y ago
I can't read the post without signing in - can someone post a copy of what is says?
- mh- 4y ago
  it's a link to a thread of many posts in the Stadia community forum. all of them echoing that they, too, lost their save game data in the game mentioned in the title. some folks said they lost 700+ hours of gameplay. an (employee?) replied and said it's been escalated.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Plus it's been marked as "Solved" with no update after the "we have escalated..." comment in ~2 days
    - mh- 4y ago
      ah yes. that, too.
    - rob74 4y ago
      Let's try to be optimistic: maybe everyone affected simply got their saved games back, so everyone is happy now and no further comments are needed?
      - smcl 4y ago
        Yeah unfortunately there are a few people on the thread complaining that the issue persists despite being marked "Solved"
Barrin92 4y ago
I haven't used Stadia so I don't know if this is the case already but cloud gaming providers need to give people the ability to download and back up their own data, or better yet just store them locally and online both by default. When LAN parties were still a thing I and a group of friends once lost an entire day of Titan Quest progress because someone stepped on a power strip and turned everyone's PC off. I'm still so paranoid over this that to this day I always back up savegames to at least one other place.
- baisq 4y ago
  Seems a terrible idea given how many code execution bugs have been found throughout the years in the "loading a savegame" part of games. You would have an RCE in your hands pretty quickly.
  - OptionX 4y ago
    Just encrypt them with a per-client key or compute a HMAC and bundle it together, so user can download them and keep them but not edit them.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      Next forum post is not "game save disappeared" but "Stadia lost my keys!".
  - FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
    doesn't matter each player is isolated from the others(unless they're insane), kind of like a rented instance on aws/gcp but it goes against their interests, more reasons to stay if all your data is there
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - RektBoy 4y ago
    Geforce NOW was best for things like this. They'd let you run VM with Win10 and Steam. So you could easily leverage to admin, download let's say RDR2 from internet and play it on VM, hehe. There is/was whole market going on, people sold "exploits" for Geforce NOW, so people would play whatever they want.
mnd999 4y ago
I’m more surprised that many people are still using stadia to be honest. I thought Google have been winding it down for some time.
- mftb 4y ago
  James says their winding down has, "escalated to a higher tier of support..." ;p
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Yeah that's exactly what I was going to say. Surprised anyone thought Stadia was a good idea (both internally at Google and customers thinking it was worth trusting their hard-earned cash to buy games that only live within the walls of the chocolate factory given Google's long established track record of pulling the rug out whenever people come to rely on them in that fashion).
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I think we need to backport "rugpull" from the crypto world to describe shutting down services that people have invested in.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    I don't even use Steam's cloud save feature. Too many stories of game servers or other data servers disappearing over the years. I'd rather rely on myself to backup my saves, even if I'm not that trustworthy of a custodian of this. At least if I lose something it's my fault. As a bit of a "privacy nut", I'm more careful about what I leave on other people's servers than most people I know, though, so I acknowledge I'm not anywhere near the median on this.
  - AnotherGoodName 4y ago
    Stadia controllers bundled with a Chromecast are (often) less than the cost of the Chromecast on its own and come with 1 month free. So not exactly a big risk to take.
    - 4y ago
bartkappenburg 4y ago
This discussion so high up at HN while the issue is non-significant compared to the events in the real world right now (mass shooting in the US, war in europe) makes me sad and happy at the same time. Sad because people seem to lose touch with reality, happy because apparently a lot of people get mad about this which means the don’t have generally speaking not a lot of other issues in their life ;-).
- TowerTall 4y ago
  If you have spend 700+ hours on this game, as some people in the comments say they have, then this is defiantly not an non-significant issue compared to something "current issue" that takes place on the other side of the planet and will be replaced with a new "current issue" next month or tomorrow. It is all about perspective.
  - bartkappenburg 4y ago
    Spending 700+ hours on a game makes me even more sadder, but that could be just me.
    - sundvor 4y ago
      Is it better to have watched 400 movies on Netflix? Or to have truly mastered a certain domain, and likely involvement with a tight knit group of people.
    - wruza 4y ago
      Other people spend hundreds of hours on visiting completely static places (stuffed with other observers), eating food there and some unremarkable social/physical activity. Nobody says “it’s so sad you traveled to <popularlocation>”.
- npteljes 4y ago
  Why is a mass shooting in the US a significant event in the real world? If you rank significance by the people impacted, you could care about the estimated million children who get trafficked each year[0]. I'd even argue that gun violence in the US is just a wedge issue[1] to drive views to news websites and stations, and to keep folks occupied, so they won't rock the boat too much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_of_children#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_of_children#Preval... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue
trinovantes 4y ago
This is a good reminder for me to make a physical backup of my game saves on Steam cloud
- number6 4y ago
  "Your save is incompatible to the current version of the game."
  - stodor89 4y ago
    Dirt Rally: "Your save is made under different operating system and is thus incompatible"
    - trinovantes 4y ago
      Imagine a game save that uses OS dependent line breaks as delimiters. I joke but I fear there's some game out there that actually does this.
      - stodor89 4y ago
        "Closed-source" and "industry secrets" are holding gamedev back big time. We get away with many practices that'd be considered backwards by a web developer even 10 years ago, and we have no viable solutions to many gamedev-specific problems. This in turn leads to just the same stuff being re-made again and again since like 2005 or so.
    - gpderetta 4y ago
      I had started playing Skyrim on an XBOX360. A few years later I got it for my pc as well. I was amazed when I found out I could easily extract the save file form the console and use it on the PC version of Skyrim without any issues! Best part is that I was running Skyrim (and the extraction tools) on Linux under wine (this was before proton even).
  - drawkbox 4y ago
    Game industry is notorious for binary blob game state. I worked at many and where possible converted to a keyed/JSON format that can encrypted if needed or keys and it led to more server based and portable profile/game states. These were hard fought battles. The best part of JSON or keyed data is less profile conversions for one new key that shifts everything by a set position. Keys can be added and removed and you don't break the entire game save. Binary blobs for game formats/saves/states is still a massive problem in gamedev. They have given many people a bad time when the profile conversion or state conversion fails and you end up with borked states. Almost impossible for that to happen with a keyed format like JSON. Getting studios to use it, especially early in dev to work with server/mobile dev was a massive challenge.
mortenlarsen 4y ago
I have lost a few save-games, so I can relate. In my case it was because I forgot about them or the fact that, I did care if they were lost (I rarely game at all). I have an "offline" Windows 7 gaming PC (only connected to a dedicated file-server, that holds the game installers, drivers, etc). I only use this PC to play Witcher 3, Fallout 3/NV, and a few others. I found this PC (i5-2500K) at the side of the curb, and invested ~$21 in 16GB of RAM, and ~$230 in a GTX 1660 Ti (6GB). It runs my games at Ultra settings in 1080p, so I am pretty happy with it. It has happened that I have lost save-games because I did a reinstall and forgot some save-games because "There is nothing important on this PC!" ...doh... I then switched to using Duplicati for backing up save games, screenshots and game configs to the dedicated file-server. I don't bother with that anymore though, because the gaming PC now runs off a FibreChannel SAN backed by ZFS Volumes. So I have snapshot, rollback and clones. Which is also quite useful for testing drivers, and rolling back to "a clean install" or "a clean install + windows updates via WSUS-offline" without waiting for the installer or updates.
- tommsy64 4y ago
  Your current gaming PC setup sounds like what I'd want. Can you give some details about the SAN hardware? What does it take to have Windows boot off of a FibreChannel SAN that's backed by ZFS?
- humpydumpy 4y ago
  Your gaming setup sounds similar to mine, but more sophisticated. I also have an offline win7 gaming PC. Unfortunately many games still require windows, but for some it is possible already to play on Linux. And it is just too much effort for me to keep a windows installation reasonably secure, to prevent games from phoning home. So offline it is. To install games, I put the game installer (in most cases bought from gog) on a USB storage device. This doesn't happen too often, I don't have as much time for gaming as I would like to. Like the sibling comment, I too would be interested in more details about your setup
RektBoy 4y ago
Class action when?
bob1029 4y ago
I think cloud gaming only takes off when the games are built specifically for this use case. Right now, streaming gaming consists of encoding GPU output, relaying player inputs, and praying everything in between doesn't notice the player isn't in the same room anymore. Think about how much compute and memory resources are wasted because we are running thousands of nearly duplicate gaming environments with wildly inconsistent utilization throughout. How much latency and resource consumption could be shaved off if the game was aware of its circumstances and engineered for this purpose?
- meowtimemania 4y ago
  I’ve generally had a good experience with Xbox cloud gaming. I’ve been playing city skylines on xcloud and decided to try downloading it to my xbox one s since my Bay Area internet keeps going it. Playing the game locally was super laggy and I only lasted a few minutes before deleting the game and playing via xcloud again.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    That is not a user experience I expected to read. Making me reconsider my stance on current cloud gaming...
- willis936 4y ago
  Not much compute and memory to be saved. You can save on storage, but who cares about that?
  - bob1029 4y ago
    You couldn't save on memory if everyone was using the same textures? The most hacky but also potentially elegant approach would be to create/modify a game engine such that it can render 4 clients at a time onto the same viewport (i.e. 2x2 1080/720p). Just like the good old days with goldeneye64 multiplayer. With a setup like this, you could take advantage of cost sharing throughout. Again, would have to build the game from zero to target this path. I think there could be some economic arguments to be made here. The software and creativity are the only real limitations.
pzmarzly 4y ago
You don't need cloud gaming to lose saves, I lost a save once when Origin decided to overwrite my save with a "newer" empty one. Make backups of things you care about
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
joshspankit 4y ago
I don’t want to log in to read, so excuse the question if it’s already answered: Is this a classic Citrix issue where the save game is in one pool of servers but not the other?
Sarkie 4y ago
This happened to me in FIFA Every time I lost my save, I added a letter to the end. I am on GAME SAVE-L They are using containers I imagine and sometimes they don't sync and get destroyed. But Stadia is awesome for me, cheap way to get a console, easy to turn on. Kids asleep, turn it on, play a game, no moving, all Cloud, all fast. I hope they don't get rid of it, but I'm expecting they do as always but I really like it. If they added Steam support, NVIDIA has, then they'd get so much more traffic.

160 points by rexbee 4y ago

danielrpa 4y ago

Does Stadia still exist? When it's on the news, it's always something negative.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bigmattystyles 4y ago

I wonder if there is a mentality that ‘meh these are just game saves, big whoop’ as opposed to say Google docs. Hopefully data is data.

tetha 4y ago
It would be a rather dangerous precedent if they don't care about the save games. On some games, the world / game save file can have hundreds of hours invested into it. If they were just like "well sucks, we might lose it, eh", it'd say something about using stadia.
- kadoban 4y ago
  > it'd say something about using stadia. It'd say that Google is not serious about Stadia, long-term. Which was already known when they announced it for the first time, so not a lot of loss there. This is very likely just a bug they'll fix soon though, at least I certainly hope so for the players' sakes.
- smueller1234 4y ago
  I can tell you that the stadia team don't look at it like that at all. I've worked on storage, I know their storage system design, and I've discussed it with the SRE team in the past. I'm not involved in any of the ongoing and wouldn't comment on it. Came here to assert that this team is neither stupid nor callous.
  - influx 4y ago
    Ok, when this issue was escalated did that team get paged in to work on a potential data loss issue? If not, I’m concerned. I’ve worked at storage at scale too, and this is standard practice.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  Would be a big red flag if Stadia would be losing save games. If I'd have invested 100+ hours into a game and it would be lost-> seriously annoyed.
avereveard 4y ago
Hopefully they just waiting for the support team timezone and it's just a matter of clicking restore on their storage at whatever point in time prior to the erasure These are paying customers after all, surely they won't go around without backups. Imagine the image damage from something like that.
- meetups323 4y ago
  > support team timezone Profit generating services at FAANG's pay good money for engineers to be woken up in the middle of the night to fix whatever problems might arise. It's been over 24 hours. There is a serious bug, and the backups aren't working as expected. Hugs to the SRE's.
RachelF 4y ago
Take a look on the Google Docs/Drive support forums. Google loses people's data quite often.

M4v3R 4y ago

This is what can and will happen if we decide it’s a good idea to rent games instead of owning them. Same with always online games - at some point the developers can and will shutdown the servers, rendering your game unplayable. It already happened several times. I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche.

wolverine876 4y ago
Did they shut down these servers?
turtledove 4y ago
I hear this, and I respect it, but I'll offer a different perspective: Media is transient, it's ephemera. We will remember the big names but forget the small things. There's more media being produced than I could consume in a lifetime, so if something disappears I can move on to the next thing. I find that experiencing media in the moment is part of the allure - this is something happening now and it's something I'm interested in now. That's not to say we shouldn't have archives and history, but letting go of my collection has been a huge weight off my back.
- rektide 4y ago
  I don't get this kind of callous, tough-love, blow-up-your-memories sell. There's nothing about any of this that looks like a ticking time bomb. Everything was fine until one day some part of the world around us unceremoniously disappeared, for no real ascertainable reason, in a way totally beyond most peoples control. This is shit. Unqualifiedly just shit. Good for you that you feel free & clear for casting off the past, but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have, for no real reason, self-destructed.
  - Kbelicius 4y ago
    > but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have unceremoniously self-destructed. It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs. Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?

wolverine876 4y ago

This could serve as a good example to aspiring developers and system administrators of the value and sanctity of user data. > Over 600 hours on 2 different characters. Both with 250 XP and at level 70 and 72. GONE!!!!!!! Imagine their data is gone for good. What compensation could the vendor possibly provide? Would $10,000 do it? User data can be irreplaceable.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
For a game? Arguably, any "damages" suffered by folks who lost data here would be limited to the amount they paid in order to play the game. You could go even further down that route and say that the game probably provides at least as much entertainment value as seeing a feature film in a theater. Since the average movie ticket cost is somewhere around $10 and the average feature film runs between 75 and 210 minutes (both according to some quick Google searches), you could say the players already got ~$3/hour in value simply from playing already. Sure, this seems like a silly exercise, but, I could imagine it getting parsed out in a similar manner should the discussion of compensation turn serious.
- dmos62 4y ago
  The player did not lose 600 hours of entertainment, so I don't think that the movie comparison works. This seems similar to burning your photo album. There might have been an emotional attachment, and a significant non-financial investment, but how do you translate either of those into money? Eye for an eye, maybe?
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    No, they did not lose 600 hours of entertainment. That's the point. They lost at most what they paid to play the game. They received back 600 hours of entertainment, making their net loss equal to: $COST_TO_PLAY - $HOURS_PLAYED * $ENTERTAINMENT_VALUE_PER_HOUR_PLAYED My suspicion is that for any reasonable values of the above variables, that loss is going to end up negative for most players. In other words, the appropriate compensation here is zip, zero, nada for most people. Even if you factor in emotional attachment, for an emotionally healthy individual, the value of a few days feeling like "oh, damn, that really sucked" probably isn't much, either. In fact, I'd say it's probably zero here, too, since most people will just get over it without any help or external cost to themselves. At least that's what I imagine my lawyer telling me if I called up with a story about how some internet gaming company lost my data. In actual fact, they'd probably just tell me I had no case, then laugh about me after hanging up the phone.

Aloha 4y ago

Judging by the number of people impacted and the comments it looks like a bug. I'm not seeing a resolution yet.

tjpnz 4y ago

People are going to lose more than their save games when Google inevitably kills Stadia.

leach 4y ago
I love stadia but it’s been on my mind that it may be dead for a while now. I guess I’d just buy a pixel with the refund they give me if it’s Google credit
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
I didn’t realise stadia was still a thing…
- number6 4y ago
  It's all GeforceNow now...
floucky 4y ago
But can Google kill it? Many people bought their games, there must be a law that prevent that... Right?
- Cwizard 4y ago
  Not too long ago Microsoft closed their ebook platform. The books all had DRM so would stop working when Microsoft shutdown it’s servers. They gave everyone a full refund for all their books I think.
- sundvor 4y ago
  It's Google... of course they can.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

influx 4y ago

Use Google products at your own risk.

rob74 4y ago
Use any cloud product (or, even more generally, any product where you don't have full control over your data, e.g. because of DRM) at your own risk.

josephcsible 4y ago

How many times does stuff like this have to happen before people stop trusting the cloud (i.e., someone else's computer) as the only place where data they care about lives?

onion2k 4y ago
I think it's significantly more likely that these people's game saves will be restored than if their local saves were lost. People are woefully uninformed, and often quite lazy, about backup strategies, especially if they play games on consoles. When you use a cloud service backups and restore becomes someone else's problem that they're paid to do well. The main problem for these people will be whether Google and Ubisoft consider it a big enough problem to bother fixing.
- godshatter 4y ago
  > The main problem for these people will be whether Google and Ubisoft consider it a big enough problem to bother fixing. It's this lack of control that keeps me gaming locally and saving games locally. My save game backup strategy is mostly non-existent, I focus on just things I create like code or writing or pictures or videos. I've lost saves before through my own stupidity and I'll curse the gods for a few minutes and start a new character or whatever or decide it's a great time to try a new game. If some company decides my lost save is not worth retrieving or I get banned for who knows what reason or they just turn off the servers one day, that's when I'll feel the pain for a long time and curse them for a lot longer than I would curse the gods or myself.
KronisLV 4y ago
> How many times does stuff like this have to happen before people stop trusting the cloud (i.e., someone else's computer) as the only place where data they care about lives? Most of the people don't have viable alternatives to this. I've actually written about some ways how you supposedly can do backups of your own data in relatively simple ways: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/simple-ways-to-do-backups https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/simple-ways-to-do-backups And yet, almost all of my IRL friends don't do backups. They don't care, or don't have the time/knowledge for redundancy of their data. So, for most of them, using Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever is going to be a far more reliable way of storing their data, seeing as very few people get banned from these platforms and lose everything. I am yet to meet someone else in person who has their own Nextcloud or ownCloud instance running. Even if they cared to do that, once again, for the majority of average people out there working with servers is out of the question, somehow everyone knows how to use a smartphone but not how to install Debian on an old PC and run a Docker image (at least without setting a bad password for the database and accidentally exposing it to the world).

ars 4y ago

I can't read the post without signing in - can someone post a copy of what is says?

mh- 4y ago
it's a link to a thread of many posts in the Stadia community forum. all of them echoing that they, too, lost their save game data in the game mentioned in the title. some folks said they lost 700+ hours of gameplay. an (employee?) replied and said it's been escalated.
- smcl 4y ago
  Plus it's been marked as "Solved" with no update after the "we have escalated..." comment in ~2 days
  - mh- 4y ago
    ah yes. that, too.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Let's try to be optimistic: maybe everyone affected simply got their saved games back, so everyone is happy now and no further comments are needed?
    - smcl 4y ago
      Yeah unfortunately there are a few people on the thread complaining that the issue persists despite being marked "Solved"

Barrin92 4y ago

I haven't used Stadia so I don't know if this is the case already but cloud gaming providers need to give people the ability to download and back up their own data, or better yet just store them locally and online both by default. When LAN parties were still a thing I and a group of friends once lost an entire day of Titan Quest progress because someone stepped on a power strip and turned everyone's PC off. I'm still so paranoid over this that to this day I always back up savegames to at least one other place.

baisq 4y ago
Seems a terrible idea given how many code execution bugs have been found throughout the years in the "loading a savegame" part of games. You would have an RCE in your hands pretty quickly.
- OptionX 4y ago
  Just encrypt them with a per-client key or compute a HMAC and bundle it together, so user can download them and keep them but not edit them.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    Next forum post is not "game save disappeared" but "Stadia lost my keys!".
- FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
  doesn't matter each player is isolated from the others(unless they're insane), kind of like a rented instance on aws/gcp but it goes against their interests, more reasons to stay if all your data is there
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RektBoy 4y ago
  Geforce NOW was best for things like this. They'd let you run VM with Win10 and Steam. So you could easily leverage to admin, download let's say RDR2 from internet and play it on VM, hehe. There is/was whole market going on, people sold "exploits" for Geforce NOW, so people would play whatever they want.

mnd999 4y ago

I’m more surprised that many people are still using stadia to be honest. I thought Google have been winding it down for some time.

mftb 4y ago
James says their winding down has, "escalated to a higher tier of support..." ;p
seanhunter 4y ago
Yeah that's exactly what I was going to say. Surprised anyone thought Stadia was a good idea (both internally at Google and customers thinking it was worth trusting their hard-earned cash to buy games that only live within the walls of the chocolate factory given Google's long established track record of pulling the rug out whenever people come to rely on them in that fashion).
- pjc50 4y ago
  I think we need to backport "rugpull" from the crypto world to describe shutting down services that people have invested in.
- godshatter 4y ago
  I don't even use Steam's cloud save feature. Too many stories of game servers or other data servers disappearing over the years. I'd rather rely on myself to backup my saves, even if I'm not that trustworthy of a custodian of this. At least if I lose something it's my fault. As a bit of a "privacy nut", I'm more careful about what I leave on other people's servers than most people I know, though, so I acknowledge I'm not anywhere near the median on this.
- AnotherGoodName 4y ago
  Stadia controllers bundled with a Chromecast are (often) less than the cost of the Chromecast on its own and come with 1 month free. So not exactly a big risk to take.
  - 4y ago

bartkappenburg 4y ago

This discussion so high up at HN while the issue is non-significant compared to the events in the real world right now (mass shooting in the US, war in europe) makes me sad and happy at the same time. Sad because people seem to lose touch with reality, happy because apparently a lot of people get mad about this which means the don’t have generally speaking not a lot of other issues in their life ;-).

TowerTall 4y ago
If you have spend 700+ hours on this game, as some people in the comments say they have, then this is defiantly not an non-significant issue compared to something "current issue" that takes place on the other side of the planet and will be replaced with a new "current issue" next month or tomorrow. It is all about perspective.
- bartkappenburg 4y ago
  Spending 700+ hours on a game makes me even more sadder, but that could be just me.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    Is it better to have watched 400 movies on Netflix? Or to have truly mastered a certain domain, and likely involvement with a tight knit group of people.
  - wruza 4y ago
    Other people spend hundreds of hours on visiting completely static places (stuffed with other observers), eating food there and some unremarkable social/physical activity. Nobody says “it’s so sad you traveled to <popularlocation>”.
npteljes 4y ago
Why is a mass shooting in the US a significant event in the real world? If you rank significance by the people impacted, you could care about the estimated million children who get trafficked each year[0]. I'd even argue that gun violence in the US is just a wedge issue[1] to drive views to news websites and stations, and to keep folks occupied, so they won't rock the boat too much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_of_children#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_of_children#Preval... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue

trinovantes 4y ago

This is a good reminder for me to make a physical backup of my game saves on Steam cloud

number6 4y ago
"Your save is incompatible to the current version of the game."
- stodor89 4y ago
  Dirt Rally: "Your save is made under different operating system and is thus incompatible"
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    Imagine a game save that uses OS dependent line breaks as delimiters. I joke but I fear there's some game out there that actually does this.
    - stodor89 4y ago
      "Closed-source" and "industry secrets" are holding gamedev back big time. We get away with many practices that'd be considered backwards by a web developer even 10 years ago, and we have no viable solutions to many gamedev-specific problems. This in turn leads to just the same stuff being re-made again and again since like 2005 or so.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    I had started playing Skyrim on an XBOX360. A few years later I got it for my pc as well. I was amazed when I found out I could easily extract the save file form the console and use it on the PC version of Skyrim without any issues! Best part is that I was running Skyrim (and the extraction tools) on Linux under wine (this was before proton even).
- drawkbox 4y ago
  Game industry is notorious for binary blob game state. I worked at many and where possible converted to a keyed/JSON format that can encrypted if needed or keys and it led to more server based and portable profile/game states. These were hard fought battles. The best part of JSON or keyed data is less profile conversions for one new key that shifts everything by a set position. Keys can be added and removed and you don't break the entire game save. Binary blobs for game formats/saves/states is still a massive problem in gamedev. They have given many people a bad time when the profile conversion or state conversion fails and you end up with borked states. Almost impossible for that to happen with a keyed format like JSON. Getting studios to use it, especially early in dev to work with server/mobile dev was a massive challenge.

mortenlarsen 4y ago

I have lost a few save-games, so I can relate. In my case it was because I forgot about them or the fact that, I did care if they were lost (I rarely game at all). I have an "offline" Windows 7 gaming PC (only connected to a dedicated file-server, that holds the game installers, drivers, etc). I only use this PC to play Witcher 3, Fallout 3/NV, and a few others. I found this PC (i5-2500K) at the side of the curb, and invested ~$21 in 16GB of RAM, and ~$230 in a GTX 1660 Ti (6GB). It runs my games at Ultra settings in 1080p, so I am pretty happy with it. It has happened that I have lost save-games because I did a reinstall and forgot some save-games because "There is nothing important on this PC!" ...doh... I then switched to using Duplicati for backing up save games, screenshots and game configs to the dedicated file-server. I don't bother with that anymore though, because the gaming PC now runs off a FibreChannel SAN backed by ZFS Volumes. So I have snapshot, rollback and clones. Which is also quite useful for testing drivers, and rolling back to "a clean install" or "a clean install + windows updates via WSUS-offline" without waiting for the installer or updates.

tommsy64 4y ago
Your current gaming PC setup sounds like what I'd want. Can you give some details about the SAN hardware? What does it take to have Windows boot off of a FibreChannel SAN that's backed by ZFS?
humpydumpy 4y ago
Your gaming setup sounds similar to mine, but more sophisticated. I also have an offline win7 gaming PC. Unfortunately many games still require windows, but for some it is possible already to play on Linux. And it is just too much effort for me to keep a windows installation reasonably secure, to prevent games from phoning home. So offline it is. To install games, I put the game installer (in most cases bought from gog) on a USB storage device. This doesn't happen too often, I don't have as much time for gaming as I would like to. Like the sibling comment, I too would be interested in more details about your setup

RektBoy 4y ago

Class action when?

bob1029 4y ago

I think cloud gaming only takes off when the games are built specifically for this use case. Right now, streaming gaming consists of encoding GPU output, relaying player inputs, and praying everything in between doesn't notice the player isn't in the same room anymore. Think about how much compute and memory resources are wasted because we are running thousands of nearly duplicate gaming environments with wildly inconsistent utilization throughout. How much latency and resource consumption could be shaved off if the game was aware of its circumstances and engineered for this purpose?

meowtimemania 4y ago
I’ve generally had a good experience with Xbox cloud gaming. I’ve been playing city skylines on xcloud and decided to try downloading it to my xbox one s since my Bay Area internet keeps going it. Playing the game locally was super laggy and I only lasted a few minutes before deleting the game and playing via xcloud again.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  That is not a user experience I expected to read. Making me reconsider my stance on current cloud gaming...
willis936 4y ago
Not much compute and memory to be saved. You can save on storage, but who cares about that?
- bob1029 4y ago
  You couldn't save on memory if everyone was using the same textures? The most hacky but also potentially elegant approach would be to create/modify a game engine such that it can render 4 clients at a time onto the same viewport (i.e. 2x2 1080/720p). Just like the good old days with goldeneye64 multiplayer. With a setup like this, you could take advantage of cost sharing throughout. Again, would have to build the game from zero to target this path. I think there could be some economic arguments to be made here. The software and creativity are the only real limitations.

pzmarzly 4y ago

You don't need cloud gaming to lose saves, I lost a save once when Origin decided to overwrite my save with a "newer" empty one. Make backups of things you care about

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

joshspankit 4y ago

I don’t want to log in to read, so excuse the question if it’s already answered: Is this a classic Citrix issue where the save game is in one pool of servers but not the other?

Sarkie 4y ago

This happened to me in FIFA Every time I lost my save, I added a letter to the end. I am on GAME SAVE-L They are using containers I imagine and sometimes they don't sync and get destroyed. But Stadia is awesome for me, cheap way to get a console, easy to turn on. Kids asleep, turn it on, play a game, no moving, all Cloud, all fast. I hope they don't get rid of it, but I'm expecting they do as always but I really like it. If they added Steam support, NVIDIA has, then they'd get so much more traffic.