40 Days #30: Store everything in the big fluffy Live Anywhere cloud
So let's say that we can actually save an extended gamer profile and all of our console settings onto a memory unit or hard drive. But then the Xbox 360 overheats and explodes, and there go all the hard-earned game saves and console tweaks. Where's the backup plan?
The real question is: where is the online backup plan? Xbox Live is one big network service in the cloud, which already stores a ton of information for each user. So why doesn't each Xbox Live account - the paying ones at the very least - have an "online memory card" that can hold a gamer profile, console settings, and game saves?
Not only does it seem like a glaring omission for a service that seems ideally suited for such a feature, but such functionality is already being offered by Microsoft across many of its online offerings: SkyDrive, Hotmail, OneCare Online Photo Backup, Office Live Workspaces - they all offer gigabytes of collective storage for free, usually ad supported. Even Halo 3 benefits from online storage for user-created content, a service which even has a premium version in Bungie Pro.
Microsoft obviously has the data center capacity, so why not offer similar features to its gaming customers? How about 2-5 GB of storage for Xbox Live Gold customers, with perhaps a 500-1000 MB variant for Silver members? Let us upload all the valuable data from our consoles into the cloud. That way, in case of a catastrophic failure of the console, or after getting a new replacement 360, we could just download everything back from the service and be back up and running in no time.
Given that saving to a possibly slow and unreliable network storage location wouldn't be practical, consoles would still need a local storage unit, and the dashboard would just use downtime during its low-power connected standby to upload the locally cached profiles, settings, and game saves. In fact, the synchronization could be two-way: in a multi-console household like mine it would be nice to have all the consoles connect to the storage locker and share game saves, so that I could boot up any one of them and continue a game from where I left off, wherever that was. Of course, since a gamertag can only be signed into one console at a time, the consoles would have to upload and download this information one at a time, but even that's better than nothing.
Online game save storage could also lead to some interesting cross-game or cross-platform possibilities in the future. How about a Games for Windows Live title that can connect to the service, find my game saves from an Arcade 360 game, and integrate it into the PC game, much like the upcoming cross-game Fable 2 tie-in? This would take that idea across platforms, even to the Zune, if it can one day connect to Xbox Live.
Perhaps even a web-based casual game that can share its data with a 360 Arcade title. Why isn't there a browser-based Hexic that is part of Live Anywhere anyway? Nobody ever thinks of the people stuck in the office who want to improve their gamerscore! MSN Games really needs to be converted into both downloadable PC Arcade games as well as Web Arcade experiences, all tied into the same service, with unified Xbox Live profiles, and centralized storage.
One day, I should be able to start an Arcade Anywhere game at home on my console, continue playing it on the bus on a connected handheld device, and then finish it off in the browser - all while the network seamlessly hands off my one shared gamed save among the different platforms and updates my profile accordingly.