In all seriousness, the fact that it isn’t the norm for video games that don’t focus on limiting use of saves – like ironman/permadeath games, or those with limited saves, that incorporate constraining saving into part of the gameplay – to automatically keep a rotating history of autosaves stretching back for some time is bonkers.

I can understand the technical limitations in doing autosaves to be real – like, one doesn’t want to interrupt the gameplay experience, and it can be hard to “freeze” enough state to do a save and do so in the background while getting back to the game relatively quickly.

But if you’ve already paid the price of creating the save, why would you throw it out? The space constraints of save games aren’t – and have not been, for decades – significant enough to not retain at least five or ten or whatever autosaves. It lets a player relatively-cheaply work around a lot of video game bugs.

The alternative is to force the player to manually save, and frankly, managing manual saves and just rabidly saving all the time isn’t…really all that fun, not to mention kind of immersion-breaking.

Even if space were honestly a constraint, I’d argue that it’d make more sense for platforms to manage save game files and to have some mechanism for purging old autosaves (e.g. that game that the player last played three years ago probably doesn’t need all ten autosaves).

I’ve played games that suggest to the player that it might be a good place to save. If it’s a good place to save, and the developer already knows that, why is the player doing the drudge work?