"Save your progress on any device" is still a broken promise

Open any cloud gaming product page. There will be a sentence to the effect of 'pick up where you left off on any device'. Sometimes there's a hero animation of a session moving from a TV to a phone to a laptop, mid-game, no friction.

The promise is plausible — cloud streaming runs the game on a server, the server has the save, so any client connecting to the server should see the same save. Right?

Cloud-server saves work reliably for cloud-native session pause/resume on the same service. Pause your GeForce Now session on a Mac, open the GeForce Now client on your phone an hour later, resume the same session — that works.

Cross-device saves where the underlying game uses cloud-platform-specific save infrastructure work in some cases. A Steam save in a Steam-streamed game on GeForce Now syncs through Steam Cloud, which means it works on your local Steam machine too. Good.

Cross-service saves: don't expect them to work. A save from Game Pass cloud streaming doesn't transfer to GeForce Now (different underlying account), and vice versa. The marketing line collapses at the cross-service boundary every time.

Game-specific save systems that don't integrate with platform cloud saves. Some MMOs and live-service games use proprietary save infrastructure that depends on the underlying client OS. These mostly work fine on cloud, but the save lives on the publisher's server, not your cloud gaming service's server. Cross-service jumping works through the publisher's account, not through anything cloud-gaming-specific.

Local saves with no cloud sync at all. Some PC games, especially older or indie titles, save to local disk and don't replicate to any cloud. On GeForce Now, your local-save game's progress lives in a VM that gets reset between sessions — it's gone the moment your session ends.

Saves split across console versions. PS Plus Premium streams console games. Their saves live in PSN cloud, which you can access from a real PS5 — good. But the save format isn't compatible with the PC version of the same game on Steam — bad. The cross-platform save story breaks at the format level even when the cloud-sync mechanics are working.

Cloud gaming services can promise device handoff at the streaming-layer level. They cannot promise it at the save-format level, because the save format is the publisher's decision.

For the cross-device promise to actually work, three things need to be true simultaneously: the cloud service has to support session pause/resume (most do), the game has to use a cloud-synced save backend (most modern AAA do, most indie don't), and the save format has to be portable across the platforms the player wants to move between (often not the case).

The publisher decides #2 and #3. The cloud service controls #1. The marketing language implies the cloud service controls all three. It doesn't.

Modern PC AAA games on bring-your-own services like GeForce Now and Boosteroid, where Steam Cloud handles the save layer. Cyberpunk, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring — all of these move cleanly between cloud and local PC because Steam handles the sync.

First-party Xbox titles on Game Pass cloud, where Microsoft's account system handles save sync across Xbox, PC Game Pass, and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5, Starfield — all syncable.

First-party Sony titles on PS Plus Premium, between PS5 and PS5 cloud. (PS5 to PC is more complicated even for first-party.)

A neutral save-format standard that publishers could opt into. The closest current equivalent is Steam Cloud, which works because the games target it directly — but Steam is one platform, not an industry standard.

What we'd actually like to see: a small file-format standard for game saves (versioned, signed, format-agnostic), with reference implementations in major game engines (Unity, Unreal). Cloud gaming services then just need to mount that standard's storage layer per-account, and the save story works across services.

This is unlikely. The game industry has been bad at neutral standards for thirty years. The realistic expectation is that 'save your progress on any device' continues to mean 'sometimes, with caveats, mostly within the same ecosystem' for the foreseeable future. The marketing line just won't catch up.