Xbox 360 Game Patching Costs $40,000

hypnosec writes "It costs developers a total of $40,000 to release a single patch on Xbox Live, making it a difficult platform for smaller developers to grow on. This revelation was made by Tim Schafer of Double Fine Studios — which recently drew a lot of charitable donations as part of a campaign to create a contemporary point and click game. He went on to say that this is just too high a fee for smaller developers to pay, making it hard for them to do well on the platform. This makes sense, since requiring just one patch could massively cut into the profits for a company."

Comments

Get it right the first time

[LostCluster]

Patches are not cheap to deploy, you've got to bother your customers and pay for bandwidth. It makes a whole lot more sense to put the effort into getting the right code onto the disc before it ships.

Re:Get it right the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

That's odd, since they're pretty cheap to deploy on the PC.

Re:Get it right the first time

[LostCluster]

On a PC users expect there to be updates that fix things, many XBox units never see the Internet at all.

Re:Get it right the first time

[jeffmeden]

Patches are not cheap to deploy, you've got to bother your customers and pay for bandwidth. It makes a whole lot more sense to put the effort into getting the right code onto the disc before it ships.

Epic first post. I was going to suggest that he not think of it as a "Patching Fee", he should instead consider it a "Don't fuck up" fee... It does sound exorbitant, but that's life in the big city.

Re:Get it right the first time

[wolrahnaes]

In this case the patches also have to go through the console's usual certification process which obviously involves Microsoft or Sony employees spending time on it. Also remember that until the current generation of consoles, games were expected to work right out of the box and not need patching. Obviously that didn't always happen, as anyone who's used cheat devices like Gameshark can attest to some big sellers had many revisions over the years and games like Morrowind on Xbox had game-breaking bugs which required re-buying the "Game of the Year" edition to fix, but the idea is that console games should not be treated like PC titles where launch-day patches are almost expected.

I'm not defending the exact numbers, $40,000 does seem rather high, but between actually charging for the certification work, CDN space, and bandwidth used plus adding a "try to get it right the first time" charge it might not be unreasonable.

Re:Get it right the first time

[Moryath]

Hell, in this generation the consoles THEMSELVES are "ship now, patch later" bullshit... Xbox360, PS3, Wii, all of them constantly need "updates." And rarely do they ever improve functionality.

Re:Get it right the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

$40,000 is approximately what it would cost to store and deliver 150 MB to 14 million people with Amazon CloudFront.

That's Call of Duty MW3 numbers using a 3rd party CDN at regular pricing.

I think it's safe to say MSFT is gouging on patch delivery.

Re:Get it right the first time

[interkin3tic]

Updates for the wii were mostly to try to keep ahead of pirated copies of games and break chipped consoles. The first year, every time I turned on the wii, it needed to update, and I was playing it every other day. It did not gain any real features in that time. The games started requiring the update as well. A friend of mine had a chipped wii and couldn't play legally purchased games as a result. At least until he took it back to the place he got it chipped for an update.

Minor inconvenience for him, slightly annoying to me, and an absolutely shitty thing to do to a kid who wants to play his legally-purchased game on his console but isn't fortunate enough to have a wifi connection to update.

By now the wii does have more features, though I don't know about a TON.

Re:Get it right the first time

[Moryath]

I'm guessing that cost is why Fallout III and New Vegas were bug riddled And Skyrim seems to be a bugfest as well.

You probably haven't played many Bethesda games then. Bethesda in general release incredibly buggy titles. 90% of the bugs fixed in the PC versions of Fallout:NV, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, and earlier Bethesda titles have only been patched because people in the mod community got so fucking fed up with Bethesda's incompetent patch division that they did the patching themselves and released it to the community at large.

I'm all for pointing out that Microsoft gouges developers on the cost to issue patches over Xbox Live, but blaming Microsoft for Bethesda's shitty coding is just being blatantly ignorant of history.

Re:Get it right the first time

[wolrahnaes]

Don't even get me started on Microsoft's boneheaded implementation of patching for games purchased on Live. Why the hell it downloads the original version then only bothers to patch when I want to actually play the game is mind boggling. If a title was released years ago and hasn't had a patch in quite some time, how hard can it be to make the version I'd download if I bought it today be patched right off the bat?

Re:Get it right the first time

[Guppy06]

If QC actually happened, would there be so many patches to begin with?

Re:Get it right the first time

[Anubis IV]

If only Microsoft had had the foresight to collect fees from the gamers using their Xbox 360 console. You might think of it as a subscription, even, and you might even give them silly names like Gold or Silver. They could use it to support the infrastructure, that way silly $40,000 fines on developers wouldn't exist. It'd be a stable source of income that could keep data centers up and running.

Ah, if only they had thought to do it. I guess it makes sense why they resort to these sorts of fines instead.

Re:Get it right the first time

[devilspgd]

Or at least queue the patches automatically as part of the download bundle rather than not even starting the patch download process until the user is ready and waiting.

Re:Get it right the first time

[Missing.Matter]

both of which are presumably being applied towards handling the same set of expenses

I think that this presumption is wrong. First, there obviously is some set of services that do not overlap, like testing and certifying patches. So Microsoft has to hire personnel to do the certification and make sure the patch won't destroy your console.

But even if we ignore that, I see it as a simple supply and demand issue. If Microsoft were to pay for all the infrastructure, data centers, and certifiers with your Live subscription, leaving no cost for the developers, Microsoft would simply be flooded with patch submissions. Every time someone fixed the tiniest bug, they would submit a patch request. What do they have to lose? Charging developers a fee ensures that they have something to lose by submitting a patch. They are forced to get it right the first time, rather than develop shoddy code with the mindset that "I can always fix it later."

Obviously Microsoft can't service this kind of environment, and the user experience would suffer when you have to download a new patch every time you want to play. Thus Microsoft charges a fee to decrease demand. So perhaps the $40k is high, but it's probably priced at a level that pays for all Microsoft's costs, attenuates demand, and earns them a little profit as well. For anyone who can't afford this kind of certification, there's always the Xbox Live Indie Games to get your game on the marketplace.

Re:That's the point

[spopepro]

I was just talking with my boss about microsoft support and found out that for our exchange problems, a tech support call is $250. If they tell you where to find a setting, $250. If they spend 2 weeks and have multiple techs on a call, $250. I came to a realization that it wasn't so much about the fact that MS wanted to nickle and dime for tech support as much as they want to impose a penalty for not RTFM. This sounds like it's sort of in the same spirit.