[stripe]

"TRC's are good. They save in long term both the publisher, and the console manifacturer." This is exactly one reason why developers are looking for greener grasses. Jonathan already said it but developers and console manufactures could economically save a lot if those TRC's/TCR's/Lotchecks would be handled more intelligently. Looking at that "save" message, why isn't there a standard message implemented by the manufacturer developers could use? Then you could just make a checkmark in the TRC docs saying "using default save msg" and everyone would save a little time. If I was a manufacturer I would take care that developing for my platform was economically for developers and me alike. And I fail to see some of your arguments for TRC's. What does size (hours, gb, dead animals?) have to do with a game being AAA? Some iOS games deliver a greater quality in terms of customer enjoyment than traditional console 'AAA' games. Furthermore Jonathan was not totally against TRC's but just used examples that make totally sense from a developer perspective.

[malkia]

About standard save - well it might be possible - but it's not clear how it should be done.

In certain games, the saving is done asynchronously. This means you have to collect (serialize) all the save game data in very short amount of time in a buffer - a millisecond might be a hitch for an 60fps shooter. Then write the data asynchronously.

So there is not much an API could help - either write the data in second thread, or use async function to write it. (open/close the file is also good to be async, or on a second thread if possible).