Ah, the problems of a masochistic nerd trying to game. For about a year now, my gaming PC has run Bazzite Linux because I got tired of Windows. I've also got a Game Pass subscription, prepaid for a long while from before I switched to Linux. This was not a well thought out plan.

While other game stores work pretty great, the only way to use my Game Pass subscription on Linux is via Xbox Cloud Gaming. The Xbox app doesn't on Linux and won't install Game Pass stuff locally on Linux. Still, streaming works pretty well for games I want to try and ditch when I get bored. But, it's so ephemeral that I wouldn't really want to commit to buying a game through that outright.

So, I started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 via Cloud Gaming. After about 13 hours in, I realized I wanted to buy the game. As it turns out, Steam likes Linux and the game runs well there. It was on sale in a bundle, so I went ahead and bought it from Steam instead of from Xbox.

But, my 13-hour-old save game was trapped in the cloud. I guessed I'd just have to abandon it and start over. That is, until I pieced a few things together:

Thanks to Xbox Play Anywhere, the saves in Cloud Gaming sync down to PC game installations. I had one old Windows laptop left in the house that would install Game Pass games - it just played them horribly. Once I installed the game locally from Game Pass and booted it up once, my cloud save descended onto my laptop hard drive.

Then, I installed the game again from Steam - i.e. the copy I purchased. From there, I could follow this guide to transplant my save file from Game Pass to Steam. Once properly transplanted, the save game found its way onto Steam's cloud sync servers and then back onto my real gaming PC.

I realize this sounds like the plot to a dork heist. But, it worked!