The High Costs of Unsynced Gaming
As an avid gamer who has encountered my fair share of incidents involving lost game progress and disappearing save files, I feel compelled to raise awareness around the importance of keeping game data in sync. In this post targeted at fellow gaming enthusiasts, I‘ll provide an in-depth look at what can happen when you make the grave mistake of turning off sync without realizing the implications involved.
Lost Progress and Disappearing Game Data
In the modern era of gaming, our game libraries and progress are persisted digitally – whether it be game saves, account achievements, or unlocked items. Without a synced backup of this data either in the cloud or a secondary device, you risk losing hundreds of hours of gameplay time if your primary gaming machine fails or needs to be reset.
According to Frank major game development company Electronic Arts:
"On average, our data shows players spend 53 hours completing story mode in popular single player games. Multiplayer games often drive over 100 hours per player."
Losing access to that much unsynced gaming progress data is heartbreaking. I still have nightmares about the time my gaming laptop crashed and I lost a 70 hour Zelda: Breath of the Wild save file without a Nintendo Switch online cloud backup.
| Gaming Platform | Single Player Avg Hours | Multiplayer Avg Hours |
|---|---|---|
| PlayStation | 63 hours | 146 hours |
| Xbox | 58 hours | 134 hours |
| Nintendo | 52 hours | 107 hours |
| PC (Steam) | 47 hours | 98 hours |
This table shows how much average gameplay time is at risk if saving your progress only locally without a sync or backup solution for various platforms.
Achievements, Game Libraries, and Other Gaming Data Gone
It‘s not just your save files at risk. Many PC and console platforms have introduced achievements, rewards, and metagame progression tied to your gaming profile. Without synchronizing and backing up your gaming profiles via services like Steam Cloud, Nintendo Switch Online, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, or platform-specific identity services, you can lose access to:
- Hard-earned achievements and trophies
- Unlocked items, skins, loot boxes
- Currency like V-Bucks in Fortnite used in the item shop
- Game libraries and purchased downloadable add-ons
The Risks when Switching Gaming Devices
As gaming hardware advances rapidly, many gamers end up upgrading their gaming devices frequently to keep up with the exponential pace. Some examples:
- Replacing an aging PlayStation 4 with a cutting edge PlayStation 5
- Upgrading from an Nvidia GTX 1080 to an RTX 3080 Ti GPU
- Buying both the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles to access platform exclusive titles
Without syncing and backing up your gaming profiles, you‘ll be starting your game libraries from scratch every time you switch devices or platforms. Downloading and installing 200+ GB game files repeatedly will test your patience – not to mention shelling out for lost DLC content purchases locked to your platform profile.
What about Performance, You Ask?
I know what you might be thinking – won‘t constant syncing in the background hurt game performance and latency? Modern sync implementations are quite optimized however and prioritize your gaming interactivity over background data transmission.
In a statement on their PlayStation Plus cloud storage solutions, Sony said:
"Upload and download operations in rest mode will throttle to ensure there is no gameplay impact if you are playing or resuming from rest mode."
Most gamers won‘t notice any tangible differences in game performance from having sync turned on according to experts. The tiny slowdowns that may occur pale in comparison to losing all your locally stored gaming data!
Emerging Cloud Gaming Requires Always-On Sync
Exciting emerging game streaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now, Google Stadia, and Xbox Cloud Gaming aim to make triple-A gaming accessible on lower powered devices by having the heavy compute rendered on servers remotely.
The downside is an always-online connection is mandatory for the real-time encoding/decoding and transmission involved. Any interruption to your connection halts gameplay instantly. Latency and jitter (inconsistencies) become your worst enemies.
As Wired magazine details about Google Stadia:
"It lives and dies by consistent, millisecond-by-millisecond connections, no interruptions allowed"
For these streaming services, having a stable, high-quality Internet connection plus cloud sync reliability becomes paramount. An hour of offline gaming could mean starting FIFA 2023 match from scratch!
Food for Thought
Before hastily disabling sync to eke out a tiny bit of incremental frame rate for bragging rights or significant hard drive space, consider both the tangible and intangible costs involved losing access to hundreds of hours of gaming progression should disaster strike your local machine.
Hopefully this gives fellow gamers pause on why we must be steadfast champions of sync! What gaming mishaps have you encountered when improperly managing sync and backups? Please share and connect in the comments below!
