Almost every developer has a system to report bugs.
In the old days it was an email or a forum, lots of devs use Steam forums and discord for this exact scenario still in todays age.
Do you have any devs in mind that don’t have a bug reporting feature where they almost always ask for a save?
Reporting bugs isn’t the same as getting personal assistance from a dev to fix an issue specific to you.
How so? Someone looks at your save and fixes the specific issue related to it. You also have to report it for it to be able to be looked at and fixed as well dude…… how else would they know the issue or be able to fix it…?
The only difference is a dev getting some marketing out of it with this specific case. Every save issue bug is a specific issue that needs to be looked at, you are always getting “personal care” with these issues.
Even Nintendo did it with a Zelda and another time for Metroid. I dont specifically remamber which ones tho. Players would get soft locked out of progression and you could send it in and they’d fix it. That was many moons ago tho. No way they’d put that much effort into anything these days.
Factorio devs fixed a bug that corrupted a 2 year old save from a guy, the limit now is a few sextillion, satisfactory took josh from let’s game it out save to help optimize the game lol, that’s the closest I can remember
Edit: found it https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=101341 the devs also fixed the save for the guy and later updated the game with a fix lol
i cant remember off the top of my head exactly which ones, but Wube will take bug reports from vanilla saves and modded saves and fix them all! Great Devs!
They even the concept (with permission) of someone else’s game that they reengineered from the ground up to help multithread the game. They’re simply amazing!
CoffeeStain has fixed some crazy Satisfactory saves that went all the way back to update 2 from 2019.
From what I’ve heard they also specifically used the insane “let’s make the factory into a bowl of spaghetti with a radioactive giant swirl towering over it”-save to do some heavy optimization improvements.
Some players take games to insane lengths in their saves, and it seems those saves can sometimes be hugely useful assets to study, and learn a lot about the game when put into that kind of state.
