Introducing PlayFab Game Saves

For more than a decade, Microsoft has set the standard for player progression and reliability with Xbox Game Saves, powering the gaming experiences enjoyed by millions worldwide across console, PC and cloud. That industry-leading foundation is now the launchpad for our latest innovation: PlayFab Game Saves. Drawing on years of operational excellence and feedback from game creators and players, we’re excited to bring these capabilities to cross-platform developers through PlayFab, starting with support for the Xbox and Steam ecosystems.

The rapid growth of handheld adoption combined with the fact that the most engaged and valuable players tend to play across multiple devices and platforms, led us to the conclusion that we could help you drive greater engagement by supporting players’ desire to have their hard-earned progress follow them wherever they choose to play. And with game developers and publishers across the industry increasingly releasing titles more quickly to more platforms, we think the timing could not be better to unlock local game saves from individual platforms.

We’re excited to announce the public preview of PlayFab Game Saves, a new service designed to make player data management easier, more robust, and more flexible, so you can deliver a frustration-free player journey.

Key benefits of PlayFab Game Saves

• Connects player progress to your game instead of individual devices or platforms so they can continue their journey any time from any device.
• Eliminates the complexity of implementing cross-platform synchronization so you can focus on delivering great gameplay.
• Supports online and offline play with control of transitions between those states.
• Minimizes the chance of version conflicts by enabling flexible game save layout with clear dependency boundaries.
• Helps players seamlessly transition between devices and platforms to maintain a consistent point-of-progression.
• Provides contextual cues to assist players in making informed conflict-resolution and single-point-of-progression decisions, when needed.
• Delivers geo-aware cloud storage and fast synchronization to improve performance and reliability.
• Recovers players from bad state with support for version rollback (coming soon).
• Works with Xbox-provided background uploader and title-callable UI, where available.

Getting started

PlayFab Game Saves is in a limited public preview so we can make sure the preview is a good fit for your upcoming title and so we can provide access to a preview SDK and direct engagement to support your planning and integration. To request access, select your title in PlayFab Game Manager, navigate to Progression | Game Saves (Preview) and join the waitlist. We also encourage you to review our documentation to begin to familiarize yourself with our approach.

Pricing

For titles in the Xbox ecosystem, the cost of PlayFab Game Saves is covered by Xbox, even for players outside of the Xbox ecosystem. For titles not shipping in the Xbox ecosystem, we plan to announce pricing when we make the service generally available.

We look forward to seeing how you use PlayFab Game Saves to deliver more engaging, player-first experiences. And we’re eager to hear your feedback as we prepare for general availability before the end of this year!