The Oculus Store’s SDK just added support for cloud saves on Oculus Quest, Oculus Go, and Samsung Gear VR.
Cloud saves have already been available on the Oculus Rift store on PC for three years now via the Cloud Storage API. But this API did not work on Facebook’s mobile headsets. The latest update to the Oculus Platform SDK deprecates this API and introduces Cloud Storage v2, which works across all Oculus headsets.
Like with Rift, Cloud Storage v2 requires developer implementation. This will only work for games where the developer integrates the API to enable the feature.
Cloud saves will persist even if the user uninstalls the game or resets their device, good news for those who face technical issues on their Quest or Go. The developer can configure the storage to be shared across all versions of a game. This means, in a game which supports Cloud Storage v2, a user could play half a mission of a game on Rift then resume it later on a Quest.
The API supports 100 files per user per app, with each file being up to 10MB. Theoretically this means a developer could save up to 1GB per user, but this seems unlikely to ever be needed in practice.
The main problem with cloud saves on Rift, however, is that the store doesn’t state whether a given app/game supports it. It’s up to the developer to state it in the description — and most don’t bother. That leaves it to the user to guess or find out by asking other users on forums, or finding out the hard way when losing save data.
Hopefully Facebook plans to add an icon to the store pages so users can easily see which apps will and won’t save their data in the cloud.
