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The Value of Your Saved Game
N'Gai and the LevelUp blog take on an interesting thought experiment: which is more valuable, the $60 game you bought at the store, or the save-game file sitting on your console's hard drive? The article explores the various ways save-games can be backed up, and calculates how much the average saved game is worth based on your age and income. "Our back of the envelope calculations clearly demonstrate that in all but one of the categories, the save file is more valuable than the game itself, and ought to be backed up regularly in recognition of that value. And that's without even attempting to figure out the worth of any intangibles: the frustration of having to replay familiar levels and challenges just to get back to the halfway mark; the attachment that you may have built up to the character; any customization and personalization you did the first time through; the loss of unlocks, user-generated content and other valuable elements." I have a massive save-game file for Oblivion that I would be very distraught to lose. Any saved-games you've been carting around or protecting over the months/years?
But I no longer see the point. I usually complete the game. When I don't complete a game it's probably because the game annoyed the hell out of me. And what use is a savegame of a game I already completed. Next time I play the game I would probably start a new game.
For games that don't really end (like sim city or elder scroll games), why would I continue with the same instance, there was a reason I stopped playing that instance.
When I first started playing RPGs on the PSX, one of the first things I bought after a memory card was a Dex Drive [wikipedia.org] to backup my saved games. After my memory card got stolen by my druggie roommate my freshman year in college, that thing paid for itself.
Games are about the journey, and the ending. Your save file increases in value until just before complete it... After that, the file is nearly worthless.
The exception to this is open-ended games, of course... There is no end to those. Even Oblivion never 'ends' because you can continue doing minor quests after you beat the game. The Sims is another obvious sandbox game that had savefiles that only increase in value... Until a new version of the game (not expansion) is released. At that point, the saves are just as worthless as the ones from games that end.
Any game that you quit before the end, for whatever reason, has no little or no value as well. The effort to get back into the game after a 2 month break is better spent re-playing the beginning and getting better at the game before you get to the stopping point.
And one last remark: Games are entertainment, not work. Playing them produces nothing of value and is only useful for relieving stress or boredom.
BTW, I'm an avid gamer with a couple decades experience.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Like other software, the data I create is more valuable (to me) than the software I bought from the store. During the days I played Disgaea religiously, at the point where I had more than 20 hours of play, lots of bills/areas passed, many characters at least transmigrated once, the amount of time and energy put into that game alone was far more valuable than the disk itself. Far more valuable. The disk could be stolen (or exploded) by Prinnies at that point and I could go out and find a new disk. If the memory card the save game was stolen (or exploded), there is not much I could do because the only way to "replace" it would be to play the game from the start.
You see this all over technology though. The 10 million piece model is more valuable than the CAD tool program that created it. The 500 million row database with years of collected data is more valuable than the software used to serve it up. This is why backups are so important to any IT infrastructure. You want to capture and safe guard the created content, not necessarily the software that runs it.
I have a completed LEGO Star Wars game on one of my hard drives that has been there for a while now. It has survived countless operating system re-installs (it is on a PowerMac, so Archive and Install is your friend), whilst the game itself hasn't been installed for what must be over a year. What surprises me is that I cannot bring myself to delete it - and yet I have no plans to install LEGO Star Wars and play it again. I guess one day I might...
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Or, at least the Steam service.
I have just re-installed all of my Steam powered games, but what is missing are all my saved games. Wouldn't it be great if I could add those to my Steam account, so that not only do I always have access to my games, but also my saved games? I guess it would only be necessary to store the last saved game, but this could really be a useful feature.
Valve? Anyone?
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Did we forget games are for fun, not for work? You can equate the "value" of your time as if it was work to playing games. If you lose a saved game, then the game should still be fun if you play it again. If not, you stop playing. Not like you're being forced to.
When I was in MOS school a buddy in the barracks had a Play Station and FF7. He gave me the first slot on the memory stick, so when ever I wanted to save, I just hit the OK button over and over. Well, after he moved out I was hanging out with another guy who had just moved in. He also had a PS and FF7 and he let me play on it one day. As we were sitting there chatting, with out thinking about it, I went to save my game, and yup, saved my brand new game over slot one on the stick.
Right over his level 97 toons.
whoops.
I think there may have been tears. There was definitely a lot of anger. I was not invited back.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
A major reason I rarely play games on my PS2 is because of its alarming frequencey of losing saved games.
Playing for hours on end, only to come back to "saved game corrupted" and the prospect of going thru all of that again, just pretty much nullifies any interest in completing any game, and thus any interest in even starting one.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If you just don't feeling like replaying your game to get back to where you were, you can often find saved games from somewhere else. That's especially true for linear games, like FPS's. Just for example, here's a collection of Half-Life 2 saved games. With some work, you could probably also find (for example) Oblivion saved games that might at least put you near where you want to be.
... is usually the end of the game for me. Somehow I feel extremely demotivated to play for hours and eventually reaching the point I was.
Even worse though, and you ALL know this; Loading instead of Saving. Don't lie, it happened to us all. Saving and loading usually require (with exception to quick load/save) a few simular actions after each other so after a while you have them automated in your head. And one fine day you start the "Load" sequence in your head instead of the "Save".
Brutal memmories.
However, I put countless hours into F-Zero GX (which you can't back up the save file), and I would be very distraught if it got corrupted because the game is So blissfully, delightfully, mind numbingly fucking hard at times (most of the time) that having to do it all again just to get back to where I was would be crushing. There are other games that have a definitive "Value cycle" as the game save in the beginning isn't very valuable, gets more valuable in the middle, becomes Extremely valuable as you approach the end, then goes back to little/ no value after you beat the game.
Even then the value changes based on the game length. If I lost my "almost at the end" save file in Zelda I would be much more upset about it than if I lost my save file for say... Max Payne.
You did reach the end. You died. Many games simply get progressively harder until you simply can't continue and die. In that regard, it's a lot like life.
This is one of those areas where computer game software is a pain in the neck. On Windows, I have yet to install a game that didn't put the save files in with the game files. Hence, you must run as admin and the game save files don't backup. I remember complaining about this 5 years ago when XP came-out and nothing has changed.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'd been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for a couple of months when the hard drive it was installed to went corrupt and lost all file information. The data was still there but all the structure of the files on the disk was gone.
I spent several nights that week with various disk recovery programs trying to get my saves back. In the end what worked was one program which allowed me to view the disk as one massive stream of characters, and a fresh GTA:SA install on a second machine so I could search for strings likely to be in my savegames. I was able to locate the probable beginning and end of my save file and copy/paste it into notepad. I was much relieved when it worked!