GOG, the digital storefront and game launcher, has announced that they will be limiting customers’ cloud save storage to 200 MB per game from August 31.
The site, which started off as a place to get your hands on older retro titles, has become one of Steam’s major competitors and now sells a huge range of major titles alongside the older classics it built its name on.
Cloud save files are files that are not stored directly on your personal PC, but rather on the ephemeral ‘cloud’. This makes it easy to play the same game across multiple computers, like a desktop and a laptop for example. It also protects your saves against any hardware-based mishaps.
Why is GOG going to limit its storage?
The 200 MB limit seems to be designed with the platform’s original purpose in mind. Older games have much smaller save file sizes and are much less likely to make frequent autosave with many stored backups, whereas more modern games (open-world RPGs are particularly guilty of this) have huge save files and many many autosaves.
Games like The Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Cyberpunk 2077 – massive, sprawling open worlds where players may invest in multiple characters – are some of the chief culprits likely to surpass the 200 MB limit.
The announcement on GOG’s support site offers some additional insight: “As the size and number of games increase, so does the demand for Cloud Storage.” It continues, “These limits ensure that all players have access to sufficient and manageable space for their game progress and that we keep the associated costs under control. By optimizing our storage allocation, we aim to continue providing a reliable and user-friendly platform for everyone.”
How to back up your GOG cloud saves
If you have a burning desire to keep every single save from every playthrough of Skyrim you’ve ever done, you can download the files from the GOG cloud into your local storage.
It’s easy to do this – select the game in your library, then click the ‘Extras’ button at the top. Scroll down and you’ll find the ‘Cloud saves backup’ section. Use the arrow to download the file. GOG has a visual guide to downloading cloud saves on their website.
How to manually delete files so you’re within the 200 MB limit
GOG has stated that they will be automatically deleting saves after the August 31 deadline, starting with files that are in the cloud save folder but aren’t actually save files, then moving on to older saves, and deleting until you are under the 200 MB limit.
If you want to preserve specific files and don’t want to be subject to automatic deletion, you can manually prune your files yourself.
Go to the Cloud Saves Management page on GOG and sort them by size to see which games are at risk of exceeding the limit. Then you can enter the folder for each game and delete the files you no longer want.
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