The first signs of an Xbox cloud save sync indicator materialize — but it doesn’t work very well

by

The Xbox Ally is here, and it’s pretty good (especially the Xbox Ally X).

Microsoft is still developing its gaming system across different devices, and it’s been a long process. The Xbox PC store has faced a lot of criticism over the years, but it’s slowly getting better. Recently, Microsoft has significantly increased its focus on handheld gaming, and many of the improvements are first appearing on the new Xbox Ally and Ally X devices.

Xbox Play Anywhere is what ties together the Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox handhelds. It lets you buy a game once and play it on your Xbox console, PC, or in the cloud, all while keeping your progress synced. It’s a fantastic feature that doesn’t get enough attention, especially considering over a thousand Xbox games are playable on both consoles and PCs with your saves transferring seamlessly.

A big gap in this functionality is how cloud saves actually work, though.

Steam shows you when your game saves are being backed up to the cloud, letting you access them on different devices like the Steam Deck and your computer. Xbox doesn’t offer a similar feature to let you know when your saves are being synced.

Microsoft has announced it’s planning to add a feature in early 2026 that shows players when their game saves are being uploaded to the cloud. This is a rare look into their development plans. A very early version of this feature is currently being tested with Xbox Insider Program members, but it’s still not working perfectly.

I’m currently investigating a frustrating bug with Death Stranding Director’s Cut save files. Unfortunately, the PC Game Pass version of the game doesn’t work at all on the Steam Deck right now – save progress keeps reverting for no clear reason. I suspect there might be a conflict between local save files and Xbox Cloud Saves, but the bug also seems to be happening with the Epic Games Store version. It’s possible the developers, 505 Games and Kojima Productions, have stopped supporting this version of the game.

A strange saving issue in Death Stranding unexpectedly showed me how the Xbox Series X|S will handle conflicts when syncing saves to the cloud. Xbox has had notifications for unsynced saves for some time, but this was the first time I saw a progress bar indicating the sync attempt.

Ugh, I’m having a frustrating issue with my Death Stranding Director’s Cut save! It’s been trying to upload from my Xbox Ally for the last half hour, and it’s just stuck at 50%. It’s a little better than nothing, I guess, at least it *started* uploading, right?

Microsoft’s approach of making Xbox games available everywhere actually draws attention to how much better its competitors are at PC gaming. Steam is a very refined platform, built over many years, and it’s not Valve’s responsibility that Microsoft entered the PC gaming market so recently.

Steam’s cloud saves are incredibly reliable – I’ve never had a problem syncing my game progress between my Steam Deck, desktop PC, and NVIDIA GeForce Now. While Windows 11 and the Xbox PC platform are more open than SteamOS on handheld devices (and offer features like native anti-cheat), the overall experience feels outdated. Either the Xbox PC store is buggy, or the games themselves are poorly supported, with developers often abandoning titles on the Microsoft Store, probably because not enough people use it.

Microsoft faces a familiar challenge, similar to what happened with Windows Phone. Few users discourage developers from creating apps, and a lack of apps keeps users away. For this new platform to succeed, it needs to be as good as, or better than, Steam – otherwise, there’s no compelling reason to use it.

We’re making progress, albeit slowly. It’s been a bit like trying to get my Death Stranding save file to sync – it took almost an hour to complete! (Update: It finally finished syncing.)

Read More

2025-10-15 17:40