Xbox Series X: 4 Ups & 4 Downs After 4 Months

2. Smart Delivery Wipes The Floor With Sony's Save System

"Why would that matter?!" we thought, as Xbox claimed they were working on a way to make sure any saves made on 8th gen games would carry across to new systems. "Surely the new consoles will just read my save files and that'll be that!"

Oh, how painfully wrong we were.

On PS5, clearly Sony weren't thinking of cross-gen save support whatsoever, and the "solution" to getting saves across has been surprisingly amateurish. As developers are left without infrastructural support like on Xbox with Smart Delivery, Spider-Man, Crash Bandicoot 4, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Avengers (to name four) have all seen bizarre, inside-the-game cloud uploads from their PS4 versions, that you then replace with the PS5 edition and hope your file appears.

Trophies then all awkwardly trigger at once in the corner of the screen, with some per-game issues occurring as not everything will show up for everyone.

Even when playing PS4 games on PS5, the system doesn't auto-pull your progress from the cloud - it's something you have to go looking for in a terribly organised, un-searchable list, every.single.time.

On Xbox this general sense of unity across all games and save data was part of the plan from day one, and your progress is ready and waiting - with the latest next-gen upgrades applied - the second you boot up.

I'm honestly surprised Xbox hasn't done a viral "This is how you transfer save data" video to get back at Sony's "how to share games on PS4" video from 2013, because it truly is night and day.