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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.
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.
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.
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'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.
there is something to be said of 'deterrence'. get your games straight or pay out the ass! i kind of like it.
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.
Frankly, I'm all for a very high fee for patching. As high as possible.
The internet made it so that games are released broken, with the mentality that they'll just patch later. The way I see it, you should have the mentality that no patch will ever be released, and test the hell out of it. Patches should be a very rare thing. By increasing the cost of the patch, you cause people like this guy to not release the patch. That hurts the users, but it also hurts him, because as people find out his game is broken, his sales will decrease. So maybe in the future, he'll keep that in mind and do proper testing.
We've made it cheap to patch games anytime. We need to make it expensive to make the cost involved in thorough testing cheaper than patching later.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Can we hold Microsoft to this 'deterrence' for their operating systems?
Actually, the bug was uncovered during the certification process. He was given the option of releasing the patch as is, or fixing the bug and re-certifying the patch and then releasing it. He opted to line his own pockets and screw his customers by not pulling the patch, fixing the bug and re-certifying. Then he complained that it was Microsofts fault for uncovering the faulty code and adhering to the patch release policies that had always been in place.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Developer pushes out game with minor, end-game bug. Developer drops $40K to patch minor bug, inadvertently causing a much more serious issue. Developer devises fix for this and attempts to publish it, but M$ demands another $40K, causing developer to reconsider his motivations and the justification for fixing such a minor bug.
$80K is a bit much to throw at a bug that only a very tiny fraction of your customers will experience... so, yeah, the fact that the game will probably go unpatched is entirely Microsoft's fault. You can go right on retelling the story in progressively poorer light, but it won't change the fact that this patch would be live /right now/ if it weren't for Microsoft's extortion.
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.
When only a tiny number of people are being effected, there is a good chance that testing would not have caught the issue. Edge cases are a constant bane.
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.
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They should have a graduated scale, maybe $100 for the first patch, $1,000 for the second, $10,000 for the third, and so on.
Except I'd really like to get most bugs fixed, eventually. This way you'd get the major bugs fixed early but the minor bugs that you only get around to fixing late would be crazy expensive to fix. I think the price should be time-based instead, the longer between patches the cheaper it gets. If you have to patch then repatch then repatch again, then that SHOULD be expensive. If you patch, collect up all these minor issues and make a "refining" patch three months later then I don't think it should cost you much. The goal is after all to avoid patchmania.
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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?