Hello,

I just checked, and, for me, the only problematic games are from... CDProjekt RED ! ^_^
Namely, The witcher 3 with 2GB ! The Witcher with 390MB, and Cyberpunk with 370MB.

What bother me is that, for the Witcher 3, there is a file "non-game-related" that is almost 900MB ! o_O
What is this ?

To be fair, I never had problem with cloud savegames apart from Withcher 3 and now Fallout 4.
Honestly, 200Mb, is way too restrictive for ARPG games.

"Subsidising"? Cloud saves are a feature offered by GoG to attract more customers to their platform. It's not paid for by the game devs, so nobody's subsidising it except for GoG themselves. If GoG is willing to offer 200 MB per game, then it makes no difference to them if they choose to put all that space together for all games to use.

Also, a 30 year-old game that released on a 450 MB CD isn't necessarily "well-programmed" nor is a modern game necessarily "poorly-programmed" that needs to keep track of all the things a player chose to build on a 4096x4096 tiles map. How much storage a save file needs depends primarily on the game, not how it's programmed. A beat-em-up that only needs to remember which character you've unlocked will never need anywhere near as much as a strategy game that needs to keep track of the current state and position of all units on the map. A developer should know as much.

Yeah, about that...

I just deleted over 200 MB worth of cloud saves for XCOM 2 yesterday, going from ~270 MB to just 34 MB for that game. Today I noticed the game using 199 MB even though I haven't launched it in 3 years, so it couldn't possibly produce any more save files.

So it looks to me like the wake-up call is more for the GoG devs than anyone else.

I've checked in this link the list of games i've played with cloud save...
https://www.gog.com/account/cloud-saves/page/1

and the biggest size game save are ¡¡8 MB!!, as i play with offline installers and almost not use galaxy with cloud store.

I must say that i don't use to replay games, and when i do it is from the beginning.

So, can i donate my storage limit to another user? :)

Just my 2 Cents on this topic:

First thing is get your URLs right. Something account related and "take action now!" and not your domain on first position? This is very bad and nobody should do this. Clean and short URLs when possible.

Next thing I've noticed is that only your Game (Cyberpunk) exceeded the storage (just by 1MB but still). Your games should be the best example on how doing things and you failed. Every other game I own on GOG (not so many but a few, when I find them), is well within the limits.

When you guys are struggling with money and having problem to keep up with the storage, you should look for better solutions. I don't know which games are that demanding with saves, you guys have the insight. With your own games, you can do stuff, to reduce the space.

One solution I think some people might consider using is using their own cloud. I have my own Nextcloud and a NAS. I don't manage my saves on my own, except when I really want to keep them, like my Minecraft worlds. I would manage them on my own cloud or external drives, when the Client does all the managing.
Obviously I would be upset if a game clutters my cloud and I don't have much control over it. When the game itself doesn't offer an option to reduce the amount of saves, then a nice configuration window would help.

I think using the own cloud fits well in the DRM Free vibe. I don't know if I would need old saves but when I have the space, why not? For people with smaller clouds, they may need more control or warnings, when a game thinks its funny to keep every auto save.

GOG going cheap.
They offered cloud saves function to have the same functionality as Steam and now they go back on their word and lowering save capacity.
This is especially bad for RPG players because games from CDPR (GOG owner), Larian and Owlcat studios have the biggest space used.
So, if GOG wants to lower available space for cloud save, please, request CDPR to modify their games so they have smaller saves.
FYI, 6 of my games are over 200MB. Cloud saves are not even properly named so knowing which to delete is way too hard. My total cloud save space used is about 3,8GB...
Also, in age when online/cloud services freely offer 50GB free storage space, limiting players with 200MB per game is not only a behaviour of cheapskate, but plain stupid too.
If you want less space used, make cloud saves easier to manage - build-in management function directly into galaxy.
At least make it total cloud save space limit for all games, do not limit it by single game.

GOG manages to disappoint more and more.

I echo comments about a delete all button. My gal civ III folder has 262 pages to go thru including mods for me to delete everything and takes up 443 MB and going page-by-page selecting 50 items at time will take a long while. Limiting storage is fine but I think 200 MB is a bit low. Maybe a GB per user would be more reasonable because like ppl have said, game saves are growing larger and the odds of lowering anytime soon are slim to none.

I've disabled cloud saves in galaxy. and started deleting them at gogs end. I didn't even realize I had cloud saves I used my local saves all the time. I didn't ask for it nor wanted it. But thanks for letting me know.

One thing I noticed, but haven't tested: These are raw dog files, right? I can't tell, since there seems to be no way to download them which seems to be an important missing step.

But uh, it feels like some zst/lzma/gz/other lossless compression methods are available would do wonders here.

Crunch up the files, send them compressed to the user end, and have their CPU unpack the full files. The formatting doesn't matter, since the user won't be interacting with it normally.

Course, this is GOG, where the avatars are lossy JPEGs, so maybe that's asking a bit much.


And if that isn't ascertainable by the Galaxy Devteam, wrap the thing in detcord and blow it to the Kingdom Come, because the loss of customers from an albatross of a client would be lesser than the continual loss from developing the damned rock.

I find this decision puzzling at best. Considering, all the games beyond the 200MB limit (for many people) will be exclusively CDPR titles. Enforcing this limit unnecessarily draws attention to this issue.

Particularly, the Witcher series created a sheer endless stream of autosaves that were never deleted, and was notorious for often consuming several Gigabytes of disk space on old save files that nobody actively created.

I would have expected that at least CDPR titles would thus be exempt from this rule, or that another solution to compress or reduce file size would be found. Witcher 1 autosaves, for example, clock in at round about 10MB each after all, and having 200 or more autosaves is pretty normal.

In addition, the cloud save mechanism seems faulty in some cases, seeing like, for example in Rebel Galaxy, it backed up recorded in game video. There is no reason for this behavior, particularly when you consider that accidentally recording useless ingame video without even noticing was ridiculously easy. People may have Gigabytes of videos without even being aware of it. Getting rid of those video files without much fuss would have been perfectly fine, considering the videos were backed up to the cloud by accident, and shouldn't even be there in the first place.

Finally, I don't think most people are even aware that GOG is backing up saved games to the cloud.
If Galaxy was actively ASKING users after installing a game if they wanted cloud saves, rather than setting it up as the default, it might reduce usage a lot.

Also, why not have Galaxy ask users when they uninstall a game: "Hey, do you want to keep the cloud saves, or should we delete them?" This might do the trick as well.

Not to mention a simple pop up once a year: "Hey, we noticed you haven't played this game in 2 years, be we still got 2GB of cloud saves you haven't touched ever since. You want to keep them a year longer, or are you done?"

And, of course, there is always the option to archive unused files to cheaper cloud storage. Chances are, nobody would even notice.

This 200MB limit feels like somebody in management failed to spend 5 minutes to look at a breakdown where the drive space usage is actually coming from, before forcing a decision down the line, that unnecessarily creates a bad impression.

Let me start by saying I do not use anything "cloud" is it's in any form possible. I never have trusted my files and information in hands of some computer that's located "somewhere" on this planet, in the hands of a unknown identity. Not only it does it not feels safe to preserve (any "cloud" provider can go "poof"), but also no one knows who has access to those files.

Anyway - I can see it would be a problem for those games that need a cross-platform (online) save to function properly between platforms. But there also loads of games that will be perfectly fine with using local storage for those save files (storage is dirt cheap these day's).

I suggest to only offer cloud storage for those games that are cross platform and multiplayer. The other games can use local storage. Do not forget that you can copy local stored games easily to another computer using a thumb stick or something like that. I do not know how that works with consoles though, because I don't own one, and have no intention to buy one either.

Anyway. It won't affect me, because I don't use a client and only local storage, but maybe the above suggestions are a bit useful for others...

I am going to echo what some others have said:

If cloud save management is going to become a thing, it needs to be vastly improved upon. Right now, all I have to get back to the cloud save management page is the link from the email - there is no way to get to that other than through that link. It *needs* to be accessible directly from either the Profile or Settings page.

And I agree that the management page itself needs to become a better experience. Full sort options and immediate deletion should be the minimum, so this doesn't become a drag on top of being a chore.

In the future, some automation options might be welcome - let me set it up so it automatically deletes files older than a set age if the storage is exceeded for a specific game.

In its current form, this is an annoyance.

"Cloud" is just a fancy name for "data stored on a web server". The moment you posted this message here, you've already used a form of cloud.

There are 3 aspects to data security:

1. Confidentiality: Aka. protection from theft. As you said, you have no idea who has access to that data, so clouds do not cover this. However, keep in mind that we're talking about game saves. Nobody cares if someone steals that data. You are not going to lose access to your bank account, nor is your rival going to steal your IP just because they have access to same game save data.

2. Integrity: Aka. protection from manipulation. Same as above.

3. Availability. Aka. backups. Cloud storage does, in fact, help cover this. You just need to remember that all media can (and will) fail, so you should never rely on just a single one. There's a reason why the 3-2-1 rule exists: at least 3 copies of the data on at least 2 different media, at least 1 of which is off-site. Cloud represents an easy and cheap way of having 1 additional media and 1 off-site location, and should not be so easily dismissed. If your house burned down and you lost all your data, having a copy in the cloud is infinitely better than not having it.

Ironically, you're suggesting the exact opposite of what any game dev would want/need/allow.

Cross-platform games do NOT use platform-specific cloud saves. Cross-platform means you could play on Steam and reuse the same save on GoG. Neither Steam nor GoG would ever allow each other to access their cloud saves. Any game dev that offers cross-platform saves therefore has to provide their own cloud storage solution that doesn't rely on GoG, Steam, Epic, XBL, SEN, NSO, etc. The only exception are games that support cross-platform between two console generations belonging to the same manufacturer, such as PS4-PS5 or XB1-XBSeries.

This is especially true for online mulltiplayer games. To prevent cheating, all online multiplayer games have to assume that the client is untrustworthy, including their saves. After all, players could easily mod their saves to give themselves a significant advantage that would kill the fun for other players. This is why online games never provide local saves.

It works the same on consoles, and NOT having to do that is the whole point of cloud saves. Besides, do not forget that you CAN'T copy locally stored data once your device breaks down. Having cloud saves is better than not having them at all.

After the GOG save game email, it's the first time I even realized that there is a cap. I can understand that GOG needs to limit capacity, but some games use a lot more space for save games than others.

I would rather see 200 MB added to the quota for every game you buy, but it can be used collectively for any game. So that way, if I own 100 games, that's 20 GB of storage space that can be used for anything. Or maybe give 1000MB up front with any new account, and then make it cumulative after that with each successive game purchased.

I don't think I ever ran into this issue with Steam.

I don't use Galaxy all that much, but it seems my biggest files were, ironically, CD Projekt RED ones: Cyberpunk and Witcher.

I don't ever really post here, but going to echo a lot of what people have said: 200 MB per individual game is pretty useless, vs. an overall cap.

For example, I (apparently) have 35 games with 200 MB each or 7 GB of space. 27 of them combine for 77 MB and change, since they are old games (note: shoutout to the Shadowrun games which are incredibly compact both in game and save size!)... and then I have D:OS2, Pathfinder games, and BattleTech with 4.5 GB.

The Owlcat games, in particular, given their size and complexity top out at around 60 MB per save as you near the endgame, vs. 800K - 1.2 MB at the early game.

I could "make do" with the 1000 MB limit for a game, but you are arbitrarily giving me a TON of allocated space I would never use, and then making that allocated space more or less useless to me.

Ya feels like these limits need some fine tuning depending on the games. Like maybe automatically calculate average savegame size per given game and then allocate accordingly

Games reaching their limit for me without having any "weird" amount of savegames just as some examples:

Divinity Original Sin 2: - Endgame like savegame ~ 14 MB each so ya we talking less than 15 saves capacity.
Dunno at least 50 saves capacity would seem kinda reasonable and that already would mean 700 MB for the game instead of 200.

Cyberpunk 2077 - Gotta say after checking deeper almost fine with the limit. Savesgames roughly about 4 Megabytes so converts to 50 Saves - considering its a choice heavy game and also own of their own (Cd Project) games like double the limit seems reasonable

Kingdom Come Deliverance - Saves games over 6.5 MB each - not enough storage for sure

Frostpunk - Personal "highlight" so far - Single Savegames exceeding 50 MB :)

The Witcher 3 - Imho fine - Savegames like 3 MB Ballpark

BioShock Remastered Funny entrant with 14MB single savegames :D :D