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Xbox 360 Game Patching Costs $40,000

Posted by Soulskill on from the does-not-come-with-a-free-car dept.

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."

2 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. That's the point by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft has said that they don't want their reputation as a retailer ruined by games requiring numerous patches that not all users can get. They say they consider it a fine on premature releases. It's also to "encourage" dlc to be charged for through their store system, so they can get a cut. If you release the content through a patch then use some sort of exterior store to unlock it, MS doesn't get a piece of the action. Part of the idea is good: companies pay for the "deliver first, make it work later" attitude that has been a little to prevalent. Part of it is money grubbing. I'm pretty neutral on the concept.

  2. Re:Get it right the first time by Moryath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In case you think I'm joking... out of the last 10 disc games I bought for the Xbox360, 9 had a 0-day patch already sitting on Xbox Live. Out of the last 10 games I bought on Xbox Live, 7 of 10 had a patch the day I bought it. NONE of the games I currently own for the 360 has gone unpatched. Not one. And to top it off, their "interface updates" made half the dashboard themes pointless and unusable, since most of the visuals wind up hidden behind that stupid bottom-half "grey shadow" area.

    The Wii games aren't patchable (which got them into a bit of trouble when Metroid: Other M turned out to have a game-breaking bug) but how often have they pushed out console updates? And what have they done with them really? Except for the one that allowed for larger SD storage and the swap-trick to "play games" off of storage (really, just leaving internal storage blank and swapping the chosen item from SD into it on the fly), what have they actually patched? It doesn't seem they've done much of anything, certainly the interface never improved.

    And let's not even get started with the garbage updates on the PS3, that actually REMOVED features...