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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.
So the guy blames Microsoft after being the one pushing out a faulty patch to begin with? LOLWUT?
This is part of the reason TF2 is largely unpatched on the Xbox... Valve was going to wait to make one big content update, but then they exceeded the Xbox's memory limitations. Whoops.
Just send '0xB16B00B5' to the console,
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
You should have the right to hack your box and the dev should be able to post the code on there own web site with a HOW to for the hackers to install the fix.
If he doesn't like the terms, he can scrap his game or disclose the problems with every sale.
I dislike MSFT, but they owe him nothing.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Yep, this is the biggest pitfall with console gaming that the internet was supposed to fix. For example, one only needs to look at Team Fortress 2 for Xbox/PS3 vs the PC counterpart.
Back in the early days of the internet me and my friends used to dream of what the internet would bring, new levels, new modes, online scoreboards, new content, online multiplayer, cheaper localization, the end of region restrictions...
Only to never see them fully realized.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Too bad the rules don't apply to product managers at Microsoft. If a defect in their product is critical enough to require a patch, the fee for recertification comes out of their budget / bonus / salary, etc. This would be incentive.
a high patch fee means more devs would think twice before releasing shit without testing it..
And then presumably give up the ability to use your box with a television. If the establishment is to be believed, hackable boxes are for desks, mice, and keyboards, not living rooms and gamepads.
The $40k fee that MS charges for patches is ridiculous. Considering they get a chunk of every game sold, the certification process should be gratis.
HOWEVER, it's also important to note that while the excessive fee is what is limiting Fez from being updated (it comes out to something like 6-8% of the entire revenue the game is likely to ever create after years of development -- PER PATCH), it is important to remember that Microsoft is NOT debugging or testing your game. They are NOT your QA department. They are merely there and receiving your $40k to test and verify that *YOU* adhered to *THEIR* very long list of requirements. Such as "do you press A or START to begin the game" and "does an interactive menu appear within the first 30 seconds of launching the game" and "can the game be completed". THAT is the certification they are doing. They are NOT being paid that $40k to debug and troubleshoot the game *ITSELF*.
Of course, if he'd released this on Steam or even entirely independently on his own site, he could patch to his heart's content.
At any rate, Phil Fish is a controversial character, but I dig the guy and hope this all settles out in the end. Hopefully he moves on to greener pastures with his next game (or, even, with this one as soon as the exclusivity breaks).
Good, maybe next time he won't release a broken game.
If you need to update your App for iOS, you simply update it and Apple pushes it out. Developers even have some opportunity to ask for a expedited review if it's urgent. If your game is free, this costs you nothing, and if it isn't, it's already covered by Apple's 30% of the price.
The walled garden is designed specifically to make sure Microsoft makes money on every transaction, no matter how insignificant. That's why UEFI is going to kill the PC... if the platform is locked, you're screwed. But at least Microsoft will be making money... so it's all good. As long as corporations control everything, we shouldn't worry.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The fix for console lockdown would be to market PCs as replacements for consoles, including a ten-foot-friendly application launcher and a web browser with a ten-foot interface (like Opera's Internet Channel for Wii). Yet no major PC maker wants to go this route for some reason.
None of us in this business like having to have games go through layers of certification testing, but it costs money to do, and if you want your game on XBL, WiiWare or PSN you deal with that. All 3 have both design and technical requirements, which are intended largely to benefit the consumer and their brand image (so you don't stare at blank loadscreens for 5 minutes, you can't have a game kill your console that sort of thing).
It is by no means a perfect system, but it overall positions a game on a console as certain quality of experience, if you can't deliver that, make your game for mobile or PC. And yes, it sucks to have to pay for bandwidth for patches and so on, but that's the point - do it properly and you don't have to pay as often, and MS/Sony/Nintendo are going to test your game to make sure it doesn't break the consoles etc. Or, you can be like endless space (which btw is a good game, albeit somewhat buggy in earlier versions) and have 10 patches on steam and not have to spend a hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.
They might have a legitimate argument with microsoft as to why they didn't catch this problem in testing the first time round - but that depends on the specifics of the bug and XBLA testing.
It's up to developers and publishers to build relationships with consumers, it's not up to console makers to foot the bill for that. Of course you could build relationships with consumers the way EA does, but that's another topic.
If you need to update your App for iOS, you simply update it and Apple pushes it out.
I believe Microsoft has the same policy for Xbox Live Indie Games that Apple has for the iOS App Store. But because Xbox Live Indie Games are not rated for material objectionable to parents, they're available only in the United States and a few other countries that lack compulsory ratings. I'm guessing that's why Fez is on the much more expensive Xbox Live Arcade route to market, not Xbox Live Indie Games.
Look at this from a business perspective. The cost to fix the patch is "tens of thousands" - Not very specific, but lets assume $20k.
We know the game sold to > 100k customers and the bug impacts 1k customers.
So... Microsoft is asking them to pay ~$20 per impacted customer, which is probably more than each customer paid for the game in the first place! Now, also consider that the bug impacts save games, but does not break the game permanently. The player likely needs to start the game over - inconvenient to be sure - but the game will play significantly better afterward.
Now, pretend you're the CEO of Polytron. What do you do?
if you can't deliver that, make your game for mobile or PC.
Except some genres are commonly thought not to work on mobile or PC. How would one sell, say, a fighting game for mobile or PC? On mobile, the player can't feel where his hand is relative to the on-screen buttons because the screen is completely flat, and on PC, players are unlikely to already own gamepads because there's no culture of gathering around a desk to play together.
users rolling their own will just disable it or add their own keys. The latter two features are mandatory for Windows 8 certified UEFI.
Only on x86. On ARM, it's the exact opposite: lack of the latter two features is mandatory.
I'm glad Microsoft is doing this. It's a deterrent to developers putting up untested patches. This could have been avoided if instead of rushing out the first patch, it was put through the ringer. And if thats too much to ask because you're an 'indie dev' then maybe you arent ready to be on XBLA. MS actually has outlets for smaller devs that can't handle the costs/restrictions of XBLA or boxed games, XBLIG. And XBLIG doesnt have an update tax.
It may sound harsh, but the bottom line is, if this is an issue, you probably shouldn't be on XBLA yet.
D
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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.
I don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face in light of the fact that the largest curated platform right now is the iOS App Store, which is several orders of magnitude larger than XBLA, and the only fee it charges its developers is the $99 annual fee to be a developer. I can understand Microsoft wanting to make some more money and to perhaps provide a higher level of quality for their curation over what Apple does, but that doesn't justify charging tens of thousands of dollars. They need to rethink their model entirely.
I love the fact slashdot is a site dedicated to making MSFT look at bad as possible at every oportunity. Very much like how Fox News for the Democrats; right up to the point where you realise they only do it because it's the only message their audience want to hear, regardless of context or even fact. Sad but true.
I'm a long time gamer that has come full circle. The xbox was the first console I've ever owned and was purchased largely because of the mess that was PC gaming in the late 90s early 2000s: game that took an hour to install and didn't work out of the box, CS map packs that had to be downloaded from the server you were connected to, games that only ran on 3DFX voodoo cards, the list could go on forever. I had less time to game as I was now an adult and I just wanted things to work.
The trade was well worth it. Now a decade later it seems all those same issues have crept into consoles. I can't play CoD with friends unless I've bought the map packs, games are coming out not fully operational, I have to PAY to play online. Taken individually I can get over most but in the meantime the price of a PC (desktop and laptop) has fallen BELOW what I paid for my 360 (and PS3, I have one of those too) at launch. Steam has made digital distribution and patching a reality and with Steam sales, has brought the cost of the software WAY down. Laptops make my gaming platform portable and self contained.
I'm not saying I won't buy the next generation of consoles but I'm going to think long and hard about doing so. I am definitely ready for the resurgence of PC gaming, not that it ever went away, but a lot of us migrated and are ready to come back. I admire the console's attempt to integrate the indie community into fold but it was a slippery slope and the repercussions of that decision are unfolding. I don't blame microsoft or the dev in this scenario, I'm just not positive that it was ever a good marriage to begin with.
...and in this case, it's "tens of thousands of dollars".
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
In this case I have to side with Microsoft. Verifying that stuff doesn't do bad things on their console is both necessary and costs money. Furthermore, this implicitly imposes a due diligence standard on software devs and what they release. I hate the practice of turning customers into beta testers. I don't feel bad for Fez at all.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
Phil Fish signed a contract with Microsoft to make Fez a 360 exclusive title, in exchange for some kickbacks (like better placement and free marketing). Fez could have also been on the PS3 and PC, however they chose to release the game only for the 360 because they wanted the MS freebies instead of having a multi-platform title. He shouldn't be surprised now that he needs to pay to cover his own bad QA with the title.
Crying about it after the fact just makes him look bad. They entered into an agreement they should have better understood before signing on the dotted line. This is Polytron's problem now, and some gamers are getting screwed.
You'd think it would occur to someone at MS that it would make sense to encourage and support any developer--even the small ones--to develop for their platform. More content means more sales, more sales mean more money. It irks me so much when I see companies ignore long term benefits for short term cash.
Hell, if I ran the platform, I'd make it completely free to develop for (or at least charge a nominal, small fee to keep out anyone who isn't serious). All I'd then do is make sure the quality is good enough, and make sure to take a cut of the sales. Kinda like Apple is doing with their ridiculously successful App Store.
Third party support and happy developers are the most important thing for a gaming platform. Nothing else matters as much. Nothing. Look at the N64, for example. Developers snubbed it, and the wildly inferior PSX dominated that generation. N64 was kept afloat purely from first and second party games (I don't believe any other company besides Nintendo could have survived with just that).
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
This jackfuck is whining because he has to pay 10k to patch HIS BROKEN GAME when he made $1 before taxes from the game?
FUCK YOU ASSHOLE. FIX YOUR BROKEN GAME. No one broke it for you, you released a broken fucking game. Man up and fix it. Spend your cash.
To me, the real problem is the timing of the fees. At "late stage" in a product life-cycle, the vendor fees really should lighten up, since neither the developer nor the vendor is likely looking at big future sales numbers. This is making a big negative impact on the existing customer base, and disincentivising patches and fixes.
Better to take a bigger slice out of initial sales to cover these kind of things and run patches through "at cost" or less.
I had less time to game as I was now an adult and I just wanted things to work.
Now that you're an adult, do you have kids? Or do you watch other adults' kids? If so, do you game with them?
Laptops make my gaming platform portable and self contained.
Consoles have had this since 1989 when Nintendo introduced the Game Boy. Microsoft, on the other hand, isn't sold on handheld gaming.
Microsoft knows damned well that any issue that exists in a game on their platform is going to look bad on their end. This is why platform makers have certification steps. Certification is expensive and tedious. There is also a queue of people waiting for certification.
The reason MS charges 5 figures is so that people don't abuse the model. Publishers have been shown in the past to ship games early despite having bugs in order to get sales or sync up with marketing demands. The idea of shipping first, patching later is demeaning to the customer especially when those patches take MUCH longer due to the development shrinking to move onto a new project or new DLC. By making this an expensive process, they force developers to take it seriously.
Also, in terms of development costs, $50 grand is not much. That's often the cost of a single license to some third party library. For indies, their development budgets are much smaller and that's why XBLIG has a completely different peer review patch system. In this case, the maker of Fez didn't go through the indie pipeline, he went through the standard developer pipeline and he's now bitching because he's getting standard development charges. He can afford it, given the success of the game.
I think Microsoft should triple the fees. I'm sick of vendors who think they don't have to take QA seriously since they can push out a patch at moments notice. Fuck 'em.
So what's the big deal, the developer has been bit in the ass even though people such as Mr. Stallman have warned them about these devices and their proprietary nature. Pay your thousands and shut up cry baby.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Everyone knows Apple has the best game platform anyway.
go find something
MS charges a huge fee for two reasons: they have to do work to issue your patch and they don't want sloppy unfinished products. Back in the days of cartridges patches weren't even an option.
Work Safe Porn
What do you think a curated platform is, what do you think certification means? Quite simply MS failed to test it complied with their standards, and as a result a bug got through.
It's not a penalty system, or a deterrent, its supposedly the cost of Microsoft's tests in certifying it.
He's right to say its not worth re-patching and he won't pay a second time for Microsofts failure. That's a decision up to him, if its not worth it, its not worth it. Why should he pay if he doesn't think its worth it? Charity to MS?
Leave it to the game console market, to make it so that the Internet is too expensive a medium, for distributing software updates.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Certification is not declaration of an absence of bugs. They're not going to regression test your entire app, or pull apart your entire source tree and make sure you didn't screw up - certainly not for just 5 figures.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21464
God damn $100 develop fee! Fuck Apple!
Why would anyone pay tens of thousands of dollars to submit a patch? That content distribution system is obviously broken, it is in both Microsoft's and the developer's best interest to make things right.
Microsoft should just host and serve the game updates from its own Azure cloud. Then just pass that hosting fee on to game devs. It's very reasonablly priced and that way devs will only pay for what they use. They will know they are getting a good market rate for the services (since Azure has to stay competitive with Amazon).
Phil Fish treats everyone like shit and bitches when he's inconvenienced.
He's everything that's wrong with indie developers; self-righteous arrogant pricks that think their games are God's gift to gaming.
This is just karma for Fish being such an anti-social crybaby. I hope he drowns in a sea of dicks.
This is a problem with any locked in system where 1 source controlls the Toll Gate to the only entrance.
One of the fellows who made the game Super Meat Boy is an acquaintance, and he stated to me that they would love to patch some bugs and add new features to the game (like Cloud saving) but to do so they'd have to pay >$10k to do it. So guess what? They won't.
Gosh, that guy never whines about anything and everything that he possibly can to anybody who'll listen.
Just pay it, Fish, and learn to code before your next game -- "Fez" is highly innovative but hardly complex implementation-wise.
Xbox and Xbox 360 don't run unmodified PC games. The product I was talking about would run unmodified PC games, whether or not they've been vetted through the Games for Windows certification process.
I wonder if MS realizes they might be cannibalizing their own console market share by releasing a desktop/settop OS
That or they want to unify the PC and Xbox markets by making the third Xbox into an actual PC, or at least a WinRT device. Look at how metrosexual the latest Xbox 360 Dashboard looks, look at how the developer fee structure for Windows Phone 7 is exactly that of Xbox Live Indie Games, and look at how Windows Phone 8 is pretty much Windows RT for Phones.
That, or people buy consoles because they have kids, and a separate gaming PC for each kid is a luxury that they can't afford.
A 7 year old console is typically about equal to a 6 year old PC since they normally have the equivalent of a next-gen GPU inside them.
That and every console of a given model has the same shader architecture, so I guess the vertex and pixel shaders can be compiled from the console's equivalent of GLSL at build time rather than runtime.
Welcome to the modding community!
The modding community is pretty much a PC thing, and not all genres are traditionally considered PC-friendly. Games in genres not associated with PCs tend not to get more than the shallowest of user-created mods. These include, for example, any fighting game that isn't called MUGEN.
Show me a PC with an ARM processor
Acorn Archimedes is an antique desktop personal computer with an ARM processor. ASUS Eee Pad Transformer with the keyboard plugged in is a current laptop personal computer with an ARM processor; it ships with Android OS.
using the xbox controller on the PC is a great transition
I agree. Which PC games do you recommend for using two Xbox 360 controllers on one PC, one in your hands and one in your son's?
few consoles have ever allowed you to play the same console game on a portable (the turbographx 16 comes to mind though)
That and the Game Gear, which plays games for Sega Master System through a simple pin adapter. And the Game Boy Advance, which plays NES games through aftermarket flash cards. And the Nintendo DS, which plays Super NES games through aftermarket flash cards. And portable famiclones and super famiclones.
With Steam cloud saves and a laptop I can play the same game at home or on the road without buying the software twice.
But can you and your son play a 2-player game without buying the software twice? I'm not aware of a lot of current PC games that allow spawn installation or screen sharing.
Presumably the patch was certified. If so, clearly certification means nothing because it didn't catch saved file corruption differences between versions, which would be one of the primary things certification should test. He should ask for his certification payment back.
Certification by the platform vendor should check that the game correctly uses the platform, but it cannot check that the game correctly implements its own semantics - that's a job only the game developer has responsibility for. This case concerns a file intended to save the state of the game so that it can be resumed from that state. In some cases, the file is incorrectly written, so the game resumes in an unintended state. You can only tell that this is buggy behavior if you understand what was supposed to happen: comparing the file to the one written by the previous version is not a valid test, because the point of a patch is to change some aspects of the previous version's behavior, and how, in general, is the platform vendor supposed to tell which differences between the versions are intended and which are errors?
Not to mention that it would be cheaper to get a couple of gamepads for the computer you already own than to pick up a console.
Yet a lot of PC game publishers don't realize this. Instead of selling a game in a bundle with a gamepad, like Nintendo did with Wii Play and Wii Play Motion, they just make a game exclusive to consoles.
And there really isn't much of a segment amongst fighting game players that are adamant about playing the genre on PC. Why would there be? There isn't really an advantage, because it isn't a genre about having lots of photorealism, CPU heavy calculations, or mouse/keyboard optimized.
If that's the case, a fighting game could easily run on the low-end PC that someone one already owns because it was bought for homework and Facebook, not built specifically for gaming. As you just pointed out, a $130 X-Arcade Dual joystick to connect to a paid-for low-end PC is cheaper than either HD console plus two joysticks.
Also.. fighting games suck on pads
I'll accept that for the moment with respect to Street Fighter style games. But consider Super Smash Bros. series and other platform fighters. Are those noticeably easier with a joystick than with, say, a standard GameCube controller?
Every author and distributor of non-free software should be scolded every time their policies cause problems.
ixidor wrote:
make it work on the super secret steam console coming out
It appears Hatta was referring to Valve and the developer of any game sold through Valve's infrastructure. Or am I missing something, and if so, what video game was distributed both under a free software license and through Steam?
Do they even make TVs and computers that don't plug into each other anymore?
That don't plug into each other? No. However:
I haven't seen either of them for sale without HDMI in years.
A lot of budget PCs, such as my two-year-old netbook, have VGA out but no HDMI. Most HDTVs have a VGA input, but not all; some just have the SD inputs, YPbPr component, and HDMI.
Most developers agree that Microsoft has squandered the leadership position they had with XBOX Live Arcade, but most XBLA developers (with the exception of a brave handful like Mr. Fish & Mr. Carmel - http://2dboy.com/2011/10/03/xbla/) don't complain publicly, because they still have to to get approval and beg for placement on the dock to escape the 360's horribly designed UI which makes games so hard to find now.
Props to Mr. Fish and his big balls for putting his foot down and bringing the patching issue to fore. Yes, Mr. Fish could have nailed the bug before ship, and I'm sure he's just as frustrated with himself as with MS, but shit happens when you're an indie. Indies have a lot on their plate, and they need to be able to patch. Sometimes they can't find bugs until the game goes live and they have enough people playing that the bug gets triggered.
The hard to find games and high cost and overhead of patching games on XBLA are just the beginning btw. For instance, developers can't ship a game on XBLA themselves. They have to go through a "publisher" that will take an additional 15% for performing a questionable "service" that no other platform requires. The 360 also did very poorly in Asia, where most humans live and where the PC dominates. You're also not allowed to release your game on any other platform before XBLA or offer features on other platforms that aren't on the XBLA version. XBLA is also the only platform where a self-funded game doesn't get you a 70/30 split, and the irony is that XBLA introduced the 70/30 split. Now, it starts at 50/50, goes to 60/40 and only to 70/30 after you hit enough sales. Also, on XBLA and unlike Steam, iOS, and Android, they have to separately secure those "decency" and age ratings in every territory they want to release in. It costs many thousands of USD if you want to actually want to support multiple languages and territories.
It's death by a thousand cuts on XBLA. None of these issues alone would condemn it, but together, they make a bloody mess. As a result of the arrogant policies, XBLA has lost key ground, and Steam, iOS, and Android are now getting the games that would once have been developed for XBLA. I think XBLA's mismanagement is partially responsible for the unlikely success of the Ouya Kickstarter campaign, and Steam is the proof that Microsoft doesn't know how to manage a game portal. With all their resources, Microsoft should have pwned Steam, but Games for Windows was dead on arrival which allowed Steam to dominate.
I think Mr. Ballmer is ultimately to blame. He lost his way and forgot the steps to his Developers-Developers-Developers dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
He has a shot at redemption with the Windows Store on Windows 8, but I don't think any game developers out there are expecting much.
Not buying some crappy unpatched game, bad advertisement.
1. Guy creates a broken piece of software, sells it, and only then discovers the bugs
2. Guy creates a broken patch for the broken piece of software, pays extortionate fees for recertification and pushes it out
3. Guy discovers that the broken patch breaks something rather serious in the broken software
4. Guy creates a new patch, but doesn't want to pay extortionate fees again.
Would you be happy to run this guy's software on your platform?
I think I'd prefer some extensive testing beforehand.
But PC games are basically all digital these days unless you're a super expensive collectors edition or a mega title.
Then call the Steam version the normal version, and call the disc + gamepad version the "In Control Edition".
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