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Epic Games Store is trialling cloud saving. Whilst the feature – which was originally scheduled to go live in May – has yet to roll out across the digital store’s full catalogue, it has been enabled on the two games currently available as part of EGS’ free weekly games promotion: The War of Mine and Moonlighter.
Confirmation of cloud saving first popped up on Reddit (thanks, VGC) courtesy of u/Henrysk, who shared a screenshot confirming the option to enable cloud saving on Moonlighter. Shortly thereafter a spokesperson from Epic confirmed formally that the feature was indeed available for both that game and The War of Mine. They also confirmed that “cloud saves will be coming to additional games soon”.
When questioned on Twitter, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney also confirmed the feature was now live, but acknowledged that as it was a “manual process” and there was “a bit more work to do” before cloud saving could be rolled out across all EGS games.
Cloud saves are enabled for a couple of new games right now. We have a bit more work to do before rolling it out more widely.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 25, 2019
“Cloud saves are enabled for a couple of new games right now,” Sweeney tweeted. “We have a bit more work to do before rolling it out more widely.” When pressed, Sweeney added that as it’s a “manual process for the store team per game” it will take time, but assured developers the change “usually doesn’t require developers to update their games”.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney recently spoke out about Epic Game Store’s PC exclusivity deals, stating that the competitive decision to make games exclusive to EGS will ultimately improve the gaming ecosystem for PC players. He also insisted that whilst “unpopular” the “strategy of exclusives […] do work”.
In a protracted discussion on Twitter, Sweeney responded to a thread in which a commentator asked him why EGS “yanked” exclusives rather than worked to have games on as many platforms as possible.
“This question gets to the core of Epic’s strategy for competing with dominant storefronts. We believe exclusives are the only strategy that will change the 70/30 status quo at a large enough scale to permanently affect the whole game industry,” Sweeney replied. “For example, after years of great work by independent stores — excluding big publishers like EA-Activision-Ubi — none seem to have reached 5% of Steam’s scale. Nearly all have more features than Epic; and the ability to discount games is limited by various external pressures.
“This leads to the strategy of exclusives which, though unpopular with dedicated Steam gamers, do work, as established by the major publisher storefronts and by the key Epic Games store releases compared to their former Steam revenue projections and their actual console sales.”
