- Home /
Can you save a user's in-game currency using google play cloud save? Is it a good idea to do so?
I have a game with an in game currency but currently if the user uninstalls the app, they lose all the currency. I was thinking of using google cloud save to load the coins after reinstall but i haven't found any examples of that. I'm not sure if that's the intended use for it or if it's more for actual progress saves.
Is this possible and is it a good idea to do so? Are there better ways?
Thanks
Is it microtransaction currency (like if you were to force people to pay IRL money for it)? or is it just something you earn in-game? Obviously if you allow people access to their currency values by saving it on their device, they have every means to access and modify it. If you save it to a server somewhere, outside of hacking into the server they have no way of changing it.
Obviously if it's microtransaction currency you'll want it saved to the cloud somewhere so they can't mess with it, if it's stuff just earned in-game it's no problem to you (since you won't lose any money on it) and the only reason you'd save it to a cloud is if you feel like players will be switching devices or if there'll be people constantly deleting and then re-downloading your game.
It's a currency that players earn by playing the game, but there's also an option to buy more for the less patient players. Currently it is saved locally but I don't think it's easily modified as it's saved using the binary formatter which is much more difficult to mess with than PlayerPrefs right?
It's not a huge game but i have a small userbase and have started getting purchases of the currency. I don't think people are likely to be uninstalling and reinstalling but i want to be sure that if they do, they aren't going to be upset about losing coins and rate my game badly/complain as a result.
Also as it stands i feel obliged to mention to potential buyers that if they uninstall the game, they will lose their coins, and i think that saying that is probably scaring them away. I could just not mention it but i think that might come back to bite me in the future.
So i if i can just make it so that their currency is saved even after uninstalling then that would be ideal. Do you think that google cloud saving is a good solution?
Answer by mlbyss · Jan 25, 2017 at 03:31 PM
This is what you're looking for (Saving Game State to the Cloud section): https://github.com/playgameservices/play-games-plugin-for-unity
Thanks. I'm aware of that documentation but i was more interested in whether it's good practise to use google cloud save or if some other method is better.
Yep, it's pretty good idea since it's free, popular among android users, provides another services like leaderboards and achievements and provides user authentication so you can load game save from different device. I would recommend you watching this video from unite where they are talking about persisting data on mobile. They used GPGS cloud save for their game as an addition to other cloud save service (don't remember its name).
Your answer
Follow this Question
Related Questions
How to prevent loading from freezing the game ? 2 Answers
Problem with showing "infinite saves" menu 0 Answers
Some help with saving and loading in Unity 1 Answer
how to properly save an int value ? 2 Answers
Saving items and reading their data 1 Answer