So...what could have gone wrong with cloud saves?

[Llunavale]

I feel like the discussion surrounding cloud saves (and indeed, transferring saves in general) has kind of died down since the games release...though I was thinking about it today and I've gotten curious about it again - what could have gone wrong with cloud saves and save transfers, that prompted Nintendo to not include them in Animal Crossing?

We have time travelling (and the biggest theory and the time was that it was to prevent "time manipulation" - which we can do anyway so, that's not an issue). There was other rumours about how it'd prevent hacking and cheating items into the game but, obviously, that's also irrelevant because not only do we have those items circulating now - we also have people reverse engineering code to see what features could be coming to the game.

So, why do you think cloud saving was left out? Something to do with multiplayer, perhaps? Maybe they were worried about being able to restore a cloud save that's "out of date" with your current save profile?

 

[Dormire]

I could save my recent save with Raymond on boxes to the cloud and keep repeating it again and again. (i.e friend will keep the funds while you keep massproducing boxed villagers) if it doesn't auto-update, that is. Or actually, any form of savescumming would be abused HARD in this game.

and also, if the save data was out of date, I think it updates on it's own if you launch the game. (That is if it's not corrupted.)

 

[Raz]

I think it comes down to money, really. They would need to offer us servers to store our backup saves. And currently, even with a paid subscription service, not a single first party game runs on a dedicated server; every game that has multiplayer components relies on P2P connection. Nintendo isn't using NSO money to offer us better services and servers (and it's painfully obvious, seeing the quality of their online components, or lack thereof...). NSO is just an extra money they can get by paywalling the online content of the games we bought, nothing more, nothing less.

Also, this is why Pokemon Bank/Home is a paid service apart from NSO. You're paying for that service because that's needed to keep those dedicated servers running (which includes maintenance). I wouldn't be surprised at all if they come up with a similar service for Animal Crossing, offering a bigger storage and cloud saves. And unfortunately, people would subscribe in a heartbeat.