PlayFab’s new Game Saves has just launched in public preview for interested developers, and aims to improve cross-save functionality – helping players to maintain a single point of progression when playing on multiple platforms. (Kinda fits in with Microsoft’s whole approach to gaming nowadays!) Initially supporting Xbox, Steam and Windows, players should be able to sync saves across the platforms.
In a blog post, the team shared a little more detail about the new update, describing the key benefits. PlayFab Game Saves promises both developers and gamers a seamless and flexible service with many benefits.
Benefits of PlayFab Game Saves
- Connects player progress to your game instead of individual devices or platforms so they can continue their journey any time from any device.
- Eliminates the complexity of implementing cross-platform synchronization so you can focus on delivering great gameplay.
- Supports online and offline play with control of transitions between those states.
- Minimizes the chance of version conflicts by enabling flexible game save layout with clear dependency boundaries.
- Helps players seamlessly transition between devices and platforms to maintain a consistent point-of-progression.
- Provides contextual cues to assist players in making informed conflict-resolution and single-point-of-progression decisions, when needed.
- Delivers geo-aware cloud storage and fast synchronization to improve performance and reliability.
- Recovers players from bad state with support for version rollback (coming soon).
- Works with Xbox-provided background uploader and title-callable UI, where available.
The team have stated that PlayFab Game Saves is currently in a ‘limited public preview’, and will not come with an additional cost to developers that are working within the Xbox Ecosystem. For those outside of this, pricing has yet to be announced. The development of Game Saves is due in part to the growth in the handheld console market, with more and more players using more than one platform to play their favourite titles.
And with greater numbers of games being released, the features that Game Saves will bring couldn’t have come at a better time for gamers and developers alike. To learn more about it, check out the blog post here.
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