Nintendo: No cloud saves on certain games

Nintendo has announced that not all games will support cloud saves as part of their premium online service, in order to prevent cheating.

Yep.

The company says they are concerned that people could abuse the cloud save system to either retrieve previously traded Pokemon, or regain previously lost points in games like Splatoon. 

The House of Mario made the following statement on Friday, 

“The vast majority of Nintendo Switch games will support Save Data Cloud backup. However, in certain games this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost. To ensure fair play, Save Data Cloud backup may not be enabled for such games. To ensure that Save Data Cloud backups cannot be used to unfairly affect online multiplayer rankings, the feature will not be enabled in Splatoon 2.”

This raises a lot of questions. Every single other console and PC platform that supports cloud saves does so for all games. Also all allow for off line backups of game data. 

Most of Nintendo’s concerns could be addressed with simple patches. Pokemon for example always used to require you to save before trades. That goes way back to Red and Blue on the original Gameboy. I’m not sure why that feature was removed from the new games, if it was at all. You’d think Nintendo could just setup their cloud service to overwrite old data as soon as a new save came in.

In the case of Splatoon, one Redditor on r/nintendoswitch pointed out that it’s unusual for modern online games to store critical player stats on the local device. Most of this information is located on the server side. 

Other games that will not support cloud saves include Dark Souls Remastered, FIFA 19, Dead Cells, and NBA 2K19. No reason was given. It’s worth noting that all of these games definitely support cloud saves on other platforms. 

This news has further raised concerns about the state of Switch Online. The platform has already been delayed a year, yet it still seems to be far behind competing services from Sony, Microsoft, and Valve. It makes you wonder what other baffling limitations you’ll be getting for your $20.