Xbox Smart Delivery lets you take both your games and your saves wherever you play, and an Xbox engineer has pulled back the curtain to reveal how it works behind the scenes.
While the current form of Xbox Smart Delivery has been quietly doing its thing ever since the launch of Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, it got a new wave of attention after the new-gen version of Marvel's Avengers arrived and everybody saw the capital "P" Process of migrating your PS4 saves over to the PS5 version, which requires updating and launching the PS4 version on your PS5 even if you were already playing it on your PS5.
If you're playing on Xbox, your saves will be ready for you as soon as you have the Xbox Series X|S version installed. Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie explained in a thread on her Twitter account what makes it so simple.
Why save file migration "just works" with Xbox Smart Delivery, a brief thread. (1/6)March 19, 2021
Each Xbox game has one common identity, no matter which of its console versions you're playing. This means your automatically uploaded cloud saves belong to that one common identity, and your console will always know where to find them no matter which version of the game the saves came from in the first place.
If you think about that a little, it means you can start the Xbox One version of a game, continue on Xbox Series X|S, and then continue again on Xbox One. Or even via Cloud Streaming! (5/6)March 19, 2021
We've come an extremely long way from plugging an Xbox Memory Unit with a roomy 8 megabytes of storage into our controllers and moving our saves around that way.
If you're still trying to pick one up yourself, make sure you check out our Xbox Series X restock guide.