Legendary game designer and Kojima Productions boss, Hideo Kojima, has revealed that he floated the idea of cross-save games a decade ago but people didn’t really understand his idea at the time. Kojima, who is pretty good at predicting the future (no joke – look at Death Stranding), randomly tweeted that he proposed a “transferring” function in order to combat the problem of not being able to carry your games wherever you want.
Cross-save games before the advent of “high-spec smartphones”
Kojima’s tweets, which usually go through a translator and sometimes lose meaning, seem to suggest that his initial proposal was more geared towards being able to transfer games from home consoles to portable devices to continue playing where one left.
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A decade ago, there were 2 choices; do you play games on a console? or carry it with you on a portable device? There were no high-spec smartphones like we have today but rather “traditional cell phone”.— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) June 29, 2022
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So what I proposed was a “transferring” function that would allow users to continue playing the same title across platforms. It was not well understood, but now it is common.— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) June 29, 2022
Cross-platform and cross-save features are almost considered essential today but up until recently, game companies were quite apprehensive about them. This is especially true in Sony’s case, who infamously blocked cross-play from being added to PlayStation platforms until Epic Games reportedly forced it to reconsider, according to leaked court documents pertaining to the high-profile Epic vs. Apple lawsuit. It was only recently that games like Borderlands 3 were given the green light to add cross-play to PlayStation.
Better late than never!
In other news, analysts say that subscription services will be growth drivers for the games industry even in absence of major hit games, and here’s a handy list of PS Plus Extra/Premium games by their sizes.
