Sony has announced that PlayStation Plus members will soon be able to store game save data online.

Available exclusively to PS Plus members from tomorrow, March 10, the newly revealed Online Storage feature for PS3 will give each user 150MB of space to play with, allowing a maximum of 1000 game saves.

Users will then be able to access their Online Storage via the PS3 XMB under the Games icon, where they can save game data or download and pick up and play from where they left off on another PS3 console.

Games saved in Online Storage can also be accessed by logging into PlayStation Network accounts on any PS3, although there'll be a 24 hour period after saving before data can be accessed on a different console.

PlayStation Plus, which also offers access to exclusive games, themes and avatars, plus early admittance to selected demos and betas, costs £39.99/€49.99 a year or £11.99/€14.99 for 90 days.

Rumours pointing to the cloud service first emerged earlier this year.

A report last month from analyst firm Forecasting & Analyzing Digital Entertainment suggested PS Plus members now top 100,000.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/29 ... e-storage/

Seems like a good idea, though they should reconsider the price. It would definitely appeal a lot more to kids in that case.

40 quid a year is pretty much the same as 'the competition' charge for their online service. I suspect the price has much more to do with that than anything logical.

Gave it a bit of a go this evening - seems fairly fast, although most saves are actually quite small; the biggest I have was 4MB, so 150MB of storage is going to go a long way. The pity is it's simple copy not sync. It would be much better if the system was smart enough to spot that you've copied a save up to the cloud and then if the save got updated it refreshed the cloud copy as well, or even better if it had some sort of version control... It doesn't appear to have any systems in place for any of that. You also can't download any 'locked' saves to a different PS3 for 24 hours for reasons can't really fathom.

Jon

Just copying the competition is not a great idea. Lower to price to appeal to kids who would be more likely to use the multi console feature, payable through gift cards or similar. It is a good idea that if implemented differently could be a big success.

It is however there is more free content on XBL than I have seen using PSN on my PS3, and the premium services are IMO better (cross game party chat, vastly better online gaming experience joining friends in games, inviting to games etc, synchronised movie watching over xbox live Zune movies, quality of service, Xbox rewards (I am almost up to getting a free piece of 240 point DLC in rewards from the service)


It's not like it would take MS much to utilise Skydrive (which is fairly unused compared to dedicated services like dropbox) to allow syncing of content across consoles

Do people need the online storage?

I've had two hardware failures on PS3 that have cost me all my save games, or at least a large portion of them. Online backup thrown on top of something that has actually represented reasonable value without it is something I'll take gladly, thank you very much.

Jon

Fairy snuff.