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Microsoft Taking Heat For Five-Figure Xbox 360 'Patch Fee'
wasimkadak sends this quote from Ars:
"Developer Phil Fish knows there's a problem preventing some people from enjoying his Xbox 360 puzzle platformer Fez as intended. But he's not going to fix it, thanks to what he says is an exorbitant fee of 'tens of thousands of dollars' that Microsoft would charge to re-certify the game after a needed patch. The issue started on June 22, when Fish released a patch intended to fix some outstanding gameplay and performance issues with Fez. That patch gave rise to new problems for some players, though, by causing their save files to appear as corrupted, in effect erasing their progress through the game. Microsoft pulled the initial patch for the game mere hours after it first went up, to prevent the bug it contained from spreading too far."
Another article covering the story suggests this situation is simply a mis-match between an indie-dev's expectations and the realities of a curated gaming platform.
It sounds more like he's blaming them for charging tens of thousands of dollars to certify and post the corrected patch.
The second article makes a good point though (and some stupid ones). He's floating on over a million dollars in sales. The crazy-high cost of certification is extortion, but it's also fair to say he has a certain obligation to the folks who bought his game. Meanwhile, the nasty little outbursts aren't going to win him a ton of fans.
I would imagine that Microsoft verifies patch releases with regards to the Xbox platform itself, and all its sub-systems, but does not extend to what happens when the patch is applied to a 3rd party developer's game.
In other words, MS verified it didn't break the Xbox, so it goes live. Oh, it broke the game? Well, fix the patch, learn a lesson in proper patch QA, and submit the new patch for re-verification. That's the way it SHOULD work.
I used to deal with this all the time at a previous position; we would intensely verify that a 3rd party patch would not tear down our Unix platforms prior to release. Those platforms were our company's lifeblood, and keeping them safe was 90% of my job. That doesn't mean I can (or care to) test whether a software update that my guys didn't write for an application we don't control had the developer's intended effect on their software. And yes, if the 3rd party changed their patch, we *would* require re-verification it before pushing it out again. You simply do not release untested software onto production servers. I don't care if some programmer protests "all I did was change a variable name and recompile!"; it's still gonna get re-verified prior to release.
I don't think Microsoft is in the wrong on this one; re-verification should be charged. Now, you may have a case if you consider the verification fee to be exorbitant.
I can't remember a game in the last ten years that didn't have something wrong with it
Right, that's my point. The past decade being when game studios could count on everyone having a fast internet connection to download patches. This is the problem that making it costly to patch can help solve.
(arguably, a near-impossibility with modern game complexity)
On the contrary. Game complexity may have gone up, but programming complexity has gone down, and it's far easier to write bug-free code than it used to be in the past. In the past, developers had to write extremely optimized code using difficult to debug obscure tricks and undocumented features of the OS and hardware, without advanced compilers that can warn you when you're using an uninitialized variable.
What actually happened is that patching is far cheaper than doing QA. You use your first users as your QA group, let them find the bugs, and then patch it. Well, as a developer in a startup without a proper QA team, the thing that I hate most about my job is debugging and QA work. I put up with it because I'm paid to do it. If I'm going to do it for your game, you need to pay me. If I'm paying you, I expect you to have made a good effort in QA. I don't expect bug-free code everywhere, because I do understand the costs go up exponentially as you get closer and closer to guaranteed bug-free, but I expect a much better effort than a guaranteed patch two days after the game is out.
So maybe something more suited to, "if you had to release a gajillion patches to make your crap functional, you dropped the ball and need to pay for our time" instead of, "first one is free, after that it's a five digit bill".
There's room for reason in there, somewhere.
Right, and I'm not advocating banning patches, so I think I am being reasonable. Your strategy encourages releasing a broken game, and then taking forever to release the first patch, as you let the users gather a large number of bugs that you can fix all at once. If you make every patch cost $50,000, for example, you know that as long as you're spending less than $50,000 on testing to avoid that patch, you come out ahead. If that's not enough to cut down the number of patches to a reasonable level, you up the price and make it cheaper to spend even more on QA.
And maybe you do graduate the cost based on developer size. Charge EA $200,000, charge indie groups $1,000. Make it a percentage of total game revenue or something.
Now, go patch something without introducing some hidden bugs, and come back and tell us how easy it is.
It is pretty much impossible to get every bug, look at big developers with hundreds of programmers who can afford large dedicated bug killing programs... Now go look at their running bug lists. Hell, Google sources the community to find bugs in some of their projects, offering money even, and bugs, big and small, manage to sneak through.
Bugs happen. Its a fact of life. Patching should be quick and simple. There is no logical reason to dissuade developers from fixing their products.
Just goes to show that you should test your code, and leave the coding to professionals.
Like who? Bethesda? Obsidian? Ubisoft? Google? Microsoft? Mozilla? None of them have ever released a buggy product, or released a fix that introduced more bugs than they fixed. Nope. Never.
Also, yes please, we should preclude the little guy from making innovative content... We need more EA games.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey