What are cloud saves, and what are potential risks and mitigations?

• A. Save data stored on remote servers; risks: data loss, security; mitigations: encryption, integrity checks, offline fallback
• B. Local only storage
• C. Automatic cheat detection
• D. In-game achievements only

Answer: (A)

Cloud saves are save game data stored on remote servers, allowing you to access and continue your progress from different devices by signing into your account. This setup provides convenient cross-device play and protection if something happens to a single device. But there are risks: the cloud could experience outages or data corruption and you could lose progress, or unauthorized access to your account could lead to tampered or stolen saves. Sync conflicts can also happen if multiple devices update the same save at once.

Mitigations include encrypting data both during transmission and when stored on the server so it stays confidential, using integrity checks and versioning to detect tampering and recover previous states, and providing offline fallback or local saves so you can continue playing even if the cloud isn’t available. Strengthening authentication and using trusted cloud services with backups and redundancy further reduce risk.