Quantcast
Community Discussion: Blog by AriesWarlock | Dear PS3 developers, STOP USING COPY-PROTECTED SAVE FILES!Destructoid
LIGHTS:  ON | OFF
surf dtoid with arrow keys

HOT GAMES
REVIEWS VIDEOS COMMUNITY FORUM SHOP

pc PS4 PS3 NEXT XBOX XBOX 360 WII U 3DS PS vita ANDROID APPLE

REMOVE ALL ADS?
Guaranteed contest entry?
A new video show?
Something else?

Vote in our membership poll

About
Player Profile
Follow me:
AriesWarlock's sites
Badges
Following  




One of the things I am scared of is losing the progress I make in games. That's why I was glad to know that the Playstation 3 system lets you backup your save files. Unfortunately, developers can make their save files to be "copy-protected", that way they cannot be backed up. Dreadful.

As a fan of action/adventure games, I am very eager to play Bayonetta, but I found out that the save files are copy-protected. I knew this would mean future catastrophe if my PS3 unit ever gets a YLOD. You see, I played a lot of Ninja Gaiden Black on an XBOX 360 - beat the normal, hard, and very hard difficulties. Beat all the missions in Mission Mode in many difficulties, and got all the costumes. I was glad to have overcome such challenges. One day, I was browsing through my save files on the XBOX 360 dashboard, and found out the NGB files could not be copied. I knew this was bad news. As fate would have it, sometime later my XBOX 360 got the RROD. After receiving my unit back from the repair center, I put on my NGB disc to see if my save files are intact, and to my disappointment I get this message:

"Unable to load game settings. They will be rewritten. Press A to continue"

What the hell? As you can guess, all my progress was gone after pressing A. That sucked very much, and it's a reason not being able to backup your save files suck. But let's go back to Bayonetta, and look at a similar case to mine from the Sega forums. Affected user RoNsTaR says:

Well, here you have a recent victim by the locked savegame. Lost a savegame with about 3 million halos (no farming!), all alfheim portals completed and halfway through the hard difficulty with all crows (even the annoying one in the alfheim on hard)... and you guess: ALL LOST CAUSE OF YLOD... and the missing possibility to backup my saves (thank god I backupped everything else the day before, i.e. my 100hour+ RE5 save...)... it was really annoying to play all those alfheims again, well guess it made me a better player since I beat Ultime Climax by now , but really SEGA, this has to be fixed, CAPCOM unexpectly did it and you could as well. Thanks in advance!

This is why I don't want to play the game, invest a lot of time in it, unlock content, and then have it all gone like the wind because developers, apparently, don't have the foresight to see that consoles can fail and it will affect your save files.

So, dear PS3 developers, stop using copy-protected files!! Oh, and Sega, please make another patch for Bayonetta. Thanks.
Photo



Is this blog awesome? Vote it up!




Those who have come:



Did you know? You can now get daily or weekly email notifications when humans reply to your comments.

Legacy Comments (will be imported soon)


I couldn't agree more!
I'm ok with saves being bound by profile, but I can't fathom the logic behind locking saves completely.
Yeah, Killzone 2 had this too and it made it awkward to finish the single player campaign on a different PS3 unit (the one with the bigger, better TV attached!). Usually I can just copy my game save to a flash drive, transfer it to my husband's PS3 and then resume the game - but the copy protected saves prevent this. :(

One of the things mentioned/rumoured for the "pay PSN upgrade" concept is apparently "cloud storage" which means you could back up your saves to a Sony server. I guess this would allow you to have the back ups of copy-protected games as well as continue playing those games on any PS3 unit.
@falsenipple
I am also OK with saves being tied to a profile, that's fair.

@Elsa
Yes, the cloud storage looks like a solution for this, but unfortunately you have to pay for that. It would be nice if copy-protected saves were disabled. It would be even nicer to stick a USB in the PS3 and have a menu ask us automatically if we want to back up save files.
I definitely agree.

The only situation in which I can kinda understand copy-protected saves is Demon's Souls. Allowing you to back up your save would make that game less of a bitch, and you wouldn't want that, would you?
"I am also OK with saves being tied to a profile, that's fair."

I don't think so. For example in local multiplayer games I'd like to pit my custom character against a friend's but I can't.
@Johnny: Profile bound saves have more to do with trophies than anything else. Not that trophies really are that sacred, but you could possibly see why saves would be profile bound because of them, right?
I do, but I'm talking specifically about games where things such as characters get their own separate file.
This practice needs to STOP now LucasArts and Activision are doing this as well. I refuse to buy any game from any company that locks the saves. a save file is OUT TIME not the game companies. Visceral Games is also doing this and i was looking forward to Dead Space 2 now i wont even rent it.

Back to Top
DLC   |   BEST Games of 2012   |   Best PC Games   |   Best PS3 Games   |   Best Xbox 360 Games   |   Best Wii U Games   |   Best 3DS Games




All content is yours to recycle through our Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing requiring attribution. Our communities are obsessed with videoGames, movies, anime, and toys.

Living the dream since March 16, 2006

Advertising on destructoid is available: Please contact them to learn more