Losing an important saved game can be painful and disheartening, but today’s gaming platforms make that much harder than it used to be. The cloud save feature of services like Steam and GOG can keep your saves safe and sync them between machines—unless they get deleted for taking up too much space. That’s what GOG has planned, so you might want to take a look at your beefy saves.
GOG, a subsidiary of Poland-based CD Projekt, offers a wide array of games from publishers like Bethesda, Ubisoft, Larian Studios, and, of course, CD Projekt Red (CDPR). Many of those titles are configured to back up their saves in the GOG cloud, which means you can reinstall an old game or play on multiple machines without worrying about managing those save files manually. Well, as long as they don’t exceed 200MB.
The company has recently announced a culling of old save files stored in its cloud. GOG has had a limit on save files for some time, but it has not been enforced. The limit is 200MB per game, which doesn’t seem like very much for a company that has traditionally been very gamer-friendly. In Cyberpunk 2077 (a CDPR game), my 75% playthrough takes up 298MB. It’s not uncommon for the save folder for open-world games to balloon to multiple gigabytes.
On one hand, it’s understandable that GOG wouldn’t want to store an unlimited amount of save data, but the 200MB cap is aggressive. It’s going to require more careful storage management for gamers who like to retain all their progress. If you can cope with only having your most recent save files available in the cloud, GOG’s new policy might not bother you.
The GOG website lets you manually remove save files.
Credit: GOG
The good news is you’ve got some time to clean up your saved games in GOG. The company will begin deleting game saves that exceed the limit on Aug 31. When the deadline rolls around, GOG will delete saves for each game, beginning with the oldest until it’s below the 200MB threshold. That means your newest saves will survive.
You can get ahead of the culling and remove the saves of your choice with surprising ease. GOG has a web interface for managing your saved games. It lists the total storage used for each title, allowing you to select individual saves to delete from the cloud. There is still some hope for digital hoarders. GOG won’t delete save files that are currently synced to your PC, so you can back those files up however you like outside of GOG’s cloud. You can also use the GOG desktop client to download cloud save files even if you don’t have the game installed.