3 ms·

Seems antithetical to the idea of cloud gaming as a platform. I agree save data should be made available for games that can also be played locally, but my under

Seems antithetical to the idea of cloud gaming as a platform. I agree save data should be made available for games that can also be played locally, but my understanding is that cloud can exclusively offer games with completely opaque backends. You don't have players reverse engineering the client, the experience is completely controlled and proprietary. For those games, save data should be kept secret.

concordDance 4y ago
> For those games, save data should be kept secret. I don't follow. Why?
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Because it's really important for publishers that users can't edit their saves on their single-player-but-always-online-with-insane-amounts-of-grind-and-ingame-microtransactions. Think about the profits!
  - andylynch 4y ago
    At the other extreme I love what Stardew Vally does here; saves are cross-platform and in a simple XML format. You can edit it and people even make things like https://upload.farm/ https://upload.farm/ to share games and ideas.
  - leksak 4y ago
    I don't think it'd be a fool-proof mitigation but something I believe would move beyond a single point of failure (which, evidently, savegames alone are) is to hash the saves. You can then upload saves that match either one of your own hashes. Hopefully, the system would be architectured so that even if the saves themselves went missing the table of hashes is still around.
    - maccard 4y ago
      You just move the point of failure from save games to the hashes in this case.
      - leksak 4y ago
        Yes, indeed, it would be problematic if they lost the hashes as well. I'm just imagining that it'd be easier to ensure there is redundancy on something like hashes which would not require as much storage to duplicate. Minor improvement, not a full-blown solution.
- maccard 4y ago
  You remove a whole host of cheat vectors in online games for one.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    If the cheat is achievable via a save upload, does it matter? I don't see how someone having a bunch of extra call of duty weapons unlocked hurts anyone else.

concordDance 4y ago

> For those games, save data should be kept secret. I don't follow. Why?

ohgodplsno 4y ago
Because it's really important for publishers that users can't edit their saves on their single-player-but-always-online-with-insane-amounts-of-grind-and-ingame-microtransactions. Think about the profits!
- andylynch 4y ago
  At the other extreme I love what Stardew Vally does here; saves are cross-platform and in a simple XML format. You can edit it and people even make things like https://upload.farm/ https://upload.farm/ to share games and ideas.
- leksak 4y ago
  I don't think it'd be a fool-proof mitigation but something I believe would move beyond a single point of failure (which, evidently, savegames alone are) is to hash the saves. You can then upload saves that match either one of your own hashes. Hopefully, the system would be architectured so that even if the saves themselves went missing the table of hashes is still around.
  - maccard 4y ago
    You just move the point of failure from save games to the hashes in this case.
    - leksak 4y ago
      Yes, indeed, it would be problematic if they lost the hashes as well. I'm just imagining that it'd be easier to ensure there is redundancy on something like hashes which would not require as much storage to duplicate. Minor improvement, not a full-blown solution.
maccard 4y ago
You remove a whole host of cheat vectors in online games for one.
- concordDance 4y ago
  If the cheat is achievable via a save upload, does it matter? I don't see how someone having a bunch of extra call of duty weapons unlocked hurts anyone else.