About Locked Games Saves

I'm writing about something that's been  bugging me and other gamers. Recently I spent $60 on a game only to find out that the software I purchased was harmed by the developer. How so might you ask?

When I tried to backup my game save it was blocked by the PS3 copy protection. Seriously? I purchased this game, I'm not a pirate and this save has nothing to do with illegal activity. Why ruin the gamers ability to save their games. It's one thing protect data from pirates it's another thing  to lock down the very saves that a user earns with their own blood sweet and tears.

When I can't recover my data because of hardware failure I feel as a gamer I'm being cheated, ripped off and robbed of my experience. I humbly ask you why do gamers allow this great wrong to them as customers. It pushes me as well as other gamers away from these products. It also encourages piracy and other forms of cheating when our games are lost forever. If this was actual game data I'd understand but this isn't. This is save game data that can be linked to the user ID. There is absolutely no reason to lock  saves to a unit when when they can be restored to the same system or linked to the user ID.

I'm very displeased with this as I've had to send in a PS3 3 separate times only to get a replaced model each time losing everything. It's in my opinion developers using protected saves started a horrible practice. This should be highly scrutinized by everyone in the gaming industry. Issues like these make me rethink investing in products from companies who support these practices. Ask yourself, why should you pay for a game when you're out hours of game play if you encounter a hardware failure or software glitch?

Developers should be forced to place a tag on all save locked games stating that the product limits save data recovery. From my perspective any game that locks the game saves falsely advertises it's function. You own the current game and all work invested playing it belongs to the developer. What good is a game if you can't keep your achievements. Of all the reasons to pawn off used games this ranks the highest in my book.

In the future I'll pay closer attention to this feature and will not be making pre-orders for products from developers who enforce it. I will also openly promote my feelings on this topic to other customers. We the customer deserve the right to restore our game saves. If It's not obvious I'm upset at the direction some developers are taking as should anyone who spends 50+ hours on a locked game.

I looked around a bit and found this blog listing some games that are locked. A few have even been patched to unprotect saves. I hope all developers start doing this. Two of these games are listed I've bought, Demons Souls and Dragon Age. I don't care about the others but will be avoiding all new games that have protection.

Here's the link. http://www.ps3blog.net/2009/08/26/locked-game-saves-on-the-ps3/

[SpoonyRedMage]

Wow, that's not really fair. I'd hate to lose all my saves.:(

[Sarick]

When I contacted Sony and explained the situation the guy I spoke to said it's the developers choice to lock the saves.

I started thinking why would Sony allow the developers to do this? Wouldn't it hurt the customer and possibly cause the user to avoid choosing their console for the game?

Seems like they might be planning a premium service. I also heard you could transfer these saves to another console with the new 3.15 transfer feature using a direct network connection but it'd erase everything on the target PS3 or was it the source PS3.

Could it be anymore useless then that it still doesn't solve the backup problems users like myself are facing.

[Saaking]

Great blog and I agree. There's nothing worse than loosing all your saved data if your console fails on you. I'm actually looking forward to cloud storage that Sony may be offering. It'll cost a bit, but it'll protect my data.

[zoks310]

Yep... you would be in an even worse position if your PS3 bricked and you sent it out for repairs only to receive a refurbished PS3, one that wont read your game saves even if you put your back up data from the bricked PS3 on it. A lot of people got burned by Sony/Developers DRM.

[Sarick]

it's the developers fault for selling products in such a fashion that even though a customer buys a game they don't own it because the work they put into it is owned by the developer. This making the reasons for keeping the game.

My PS3 was replaced with another unit each time. They didn't even bother repairing it. I Ask Sony to make every effort to repair my last console but it fell of deaf ears.

As for the developers.

It's plan pathetic that they cry blood when companies like Gamestop etc. resale their used games. They've even created DL content and given it out to original purchases to discourage customers from buying used games.

I feel These locked saves are an incentive for gamers to trade in these games because the developers themselves don't care enough to make the games worth of keeping in their collections. It's not in a gamers best interest to keep products that self destruct game achievements if tragedy hits. I'm not talking tropies I'm speaking about actual earned game data.

In my opinion developers who choose to not think outside the box by flat out copy protecting their games saves in laziness deserve every penny lost to used game sales and rentals.

This is exactly why I took the time to write this blog. I'm very passionate about the locked saves ruining the experience of many gamers. I'm no journalist I'm no one big and successful in the industry. I'm just an average Joe with a strong moral obligation to stand up for myself and others about this issue.

If we the gamer don't recognize we're losing our gaming privileges and stand up we might as well just quit gaming. The Industry is headed towards locking all content and frankly, I'm not happy about it.

We do pay for the rights to play and earn these achievements for ourselves. We're not all pirates and cheaters. So, why are we being treated as such? Copy protected saves are a lazy way to defend against dupe copying, save game piracy and cheating, plan and simple. I just wish more gamers where made aware of this problem and willing to stand up to it. Most journalist won't even touch it so it's left relatively ignored.

Many thanks for you're comment. -Sarick

[zoks310]

If the unit was 100% reliable then ok lock saved games and content to the PS3, but that's not the case the PS3 does brick and once it does you lose everything...... with no hope of getting it back unless you find a local repair shop that wont touch the HDD.

If you send it to Sony they will format the HDD and send you back a refurbished system, totally negating your back up data. If Sony does not see this as an issue then maybe it is time to give up on gaming.

The message they send with this process is very concerning and terrifying, they simple don't care that you lost hundreds of hours of game play time if they send you a system that wont be able to accept your back up data because the backup data was made on a different PS3.

It gets worst if you had movies on that old PS3, as you can only download them once and Sony wont allow you to re-download them onto any other PS3 because the movies are also lock to the original PS3 they were purchased on.

I got burned bad, my PS3 was out of warranty when it YLOD on me. So I sent it out to a local shop that would repair it at 1/3 the cost that Sony does, they will send back my original unit, and they wont format the HDD, ooh happy day. I get my PS3 back in a week and all my data are still there.
Sony announces Data Transfer in 3.15 update, so I say to myself, being that this PS3 will YLOD on me again why not invest in a Slim? so I did and with 3.15 update I'll be back to gaming on a more reliable PS3. Not so easy, Data transfer did not work, it kept on crashing at 87% completion.

So I called Sony and they could not help, thy wanted me to send in my units for repair, and they would charge me $150 for the out of warranty unit and nothing for the Slim. I told them no!! both systems are working fine now and it's the Data Transfer utility that is bugged.

They said then there is nothing we can do. I decided to cut my loses and gave up. I stayed up all night and re-downloaded all my PSN titles (2 years worth of titles, over 150 downloads), and whatever unprotected game saves that I was allowed to transfer, I did it all the hard way with a external HDD, all this to get the Slim up and running.

My movies are stuck on the old PS3 but it's ok, I'll have to keep that PS3 and just use it for movies. The games that have copy protection on the save data I sold to Gamestop, because I was not going to re-play them again.

I also decided not to purchase anything on the PSN any more, The DRM is way too restrictive. I'll just rent from now on, and instead of buying movies on the PSN I'll just buy the hard copy at the stores so that way I'll always have them.

Sony drop the ball here PSN/Developers DRM will kill it for a lot of people in my position...

[Delta]

Nice blog. I agree with you.

[macalatus]

I totally agree with you 100%. This doesn't mean I agree with Sony, however, I think the reason why it's like that is because Sony doesn't people to cheat on trophies.

[Digitaldude]

If you do a full backup it copies protected saves (I think)
I did that when I changed HDD and could use all my saves.

[creamydingle]

Your correct Digitaldude if you use the backup up feature in the system settings it will backup all saves including locked saves so you do not have to lose any of your saves pretty easy really. I do a backup up every fortnight since i got my launch day ps3 and have changed the harddrive 3 times now keep upgrading and have never lost any save game. Went from a 180 to a 320 and just recently put a 500gb 7200rpm drive in. I just set the backup software going and usually before i go to bed wake up in the morning and bang all my game saves and everything are saved.

[Sarick]

Yes If you upgrade your HDD the saves do get backed up to the HDD. On the negative side though when you lose a console or it breaks the saves on it that where protected do not restore. If you guys want to check it out take your backup to a new console and try to restore data content.

If it's the same unit it might take 20 minutes to recover everything. On the other hand, If it's another system it'll tell you not all content can be recovered and take something like 5-20 seconds. You can't even call up Sony to have them authorize the system restore to allow a single transfer to the new system even though they know it was replaced at their shops.

I think you both for the comments but to be honest both of you haven't encountered this problem yet. You've been lucky enough to not have a hardware failure and lose your console. When you do be sure to try your backup on your replaced unit. You'll see how useful those backups are when they don't restore everything from those backups.

I can assure you anything that is copy protected will not recover. If you read the user manual it even clearly states some data is locked and can't be restored. Fortunately you can re-download some purchased content under your account if you need to activate it on another console. This wonderful feature isn't available to save data.

[fan_of_gaming]

the PS3 is not the only console that does this, in fact all 3 of them do. From my personal experience Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros Brawl cannot be backed up on the Wii; Gears of War 2, Halo 3 and Forza 3 cannot be backed up on X360, and i'm sure there is others that cannot be backed up as well that i do not own.

[Sarick]

If I remember correctly 360 has copy protection but it also has proprietary hardware memory cartridges. These allow the user to save the games to these cards and even let them go to friends houses with those saves provided they log on that gamertag.

On a side note, both the Wii and 360 have been hacked and cracked. They hardly represent the same security level of the PS3 in terms of locking saves. It's good to know though that PS3 isn't the only console locking saves. It does however, place emphasize on just how bad this practice is becoming and the direction companies are headed.

Ask yourself this, do you think you're losing privileges when in the past we could just swap our memory cards out and create a new save on another memory card? Those days are headed out and before we can say next gen most titles might be locked to the system.

When gamers become desensitized to this practice and no one cares we might as well just rent our games because the content in them is locked.

I've neglected to applaud one company that stands out in the industry and seems to have done things right. If developers followed their example it'd be awesome and not such a big deal. That company is Media Molecule. Their Little Big Planet allows the gamer to backup this stuff both online and offline. The saves can be imported exported.

They've done everything to allow saves to be migrated to other consoles. Even set the saves up to know when a user is trying to use content they don't own or have installed. Still the saves work and can be restored.

[fan_of_gaming]

I recently had my own bad experience with locked game saves. I backup all of mine to a USB stick, but certain games such as Rock Band 2 and Killzone 2 wouldn't allow me. I then started having some freezing issues for games on my 60GB, so i gave it to my parents as a blu-ray player and bought a new slim, but of course could not put my old saves for some games onto it, so i lost all my progress in those games, which is quite annoying.

Oh and for the other consoles locked saves, I did buy a Microsoft 512MB memory card and put it into my Elite as a method of save game backup, however of my 4 games (Halo 3, GOW2, ME and Forza 3), only Mass Effect would allow me to copy the save, and I use an SD Card for my Wii but again Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros and I think Wii Sports Resort (not positive on that one) said "cannot copy data"