Microsoft Taking Heat For Five-Figure Xbox 360 'Patch Fee' 323
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.
Team Fortress 2 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Team Fortress 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Different people use the same device differently. I'll bet that the person you replied to plays at least some different games than you do, therefore their Xbox 360 experience may indeed be different than yours.
Now go kill some bad guys.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Team Fortress 2 (Score:5, Funny)
Went over 640k huh? Gotta watch out for that.
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patched (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't you know that friends have access to your privates?
Why should MSFT work free because he fucked up? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why should MSFT work free because he fucked up? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dislike MSFT, but they owe him nothing.
That's true. Well, beyond what they charged him for the dev kit, and the fee to publish on XBLA, plus their part of the profits from the game sold, plus the tens of thousands he paid them to certify the first patch. So, you know, the hundreds of thousands (at a guess, could be millions or a few thousand) of dollars they have made off him. Beyond that, nothing at all!
OTOH, he did fuck up, and he could publish the patch even now if he really wanted to (but it only affects a few people who already finished the game before the patch, so it wouldn't be worth it financially from his point of view). Frankly, neither MSFT nor Fish comes up looking very good from this whole ordeal.
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they charged him for the dev kit,
Ok, they owe him a dev kit.
and the fee to publish on XBLA, plus their part of the profits from the game sold,
Which is one and the same, so they owe him the publishing of his game.
plus the tens of thousands he paid them to certify the first patch
And they owe him a verification of the first patch.
Are you saying they have not delivered on any of these?
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I doubt the verification is advertised as a Microsoft finding your bugs for you.
Re:Why should MSFT work free because he fucked up? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Now, you may have a case if you consider the verification fee to be exorbitant.
It's unquestionably exorbitant and egregious.
All we are talking about is re-verification. I can't possibly believe this would take more than 100-200 hours across techs (that's generous I think), supervisors, etc. to recertify. If tens of thousands of dollars meant $30k, that means Microsoft is charging between $150 and $300 dollars per hour to recertify a patch on a freakin gaming console. Just how much testing is involved here? This leads me to believe that Microsoft does more testing on game developer
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I dislike MSFT, but they owe him nothing.
That's true. Well, beyond what they charged him for the dev kit, and the fee to publish on XBLA, plus their part of the profits from the game sold, plus the tens of thousands he paid them to certify the first patch. So, you know, the hundreds of thousands (at a guess, could be millions or a few thousand) of dollars they have made off him. Beyond that, nothing at all!
OTOH, he did fuck up, and he could publish the patch even now if he really wanted to (but it only affects a few people who already finished the game before the patch, so it wouldn't be worth it financially from his point of view). Frankly, neither MSFT nor Fish comes up looking very good from this whole ordeal.
Maintaining the XBLA platform, curating many many games, watching for bugs (which is why this one even got caught in the first place) and all that is not cheap. The unfortunate thing is that it looks like the developer basically says that since the bug is only likely to exhibit itself on systems where the game has been played a lot (i.e. customers that already paid) that he isn't going to incur the cost of releasing the patch. It sure sounds like "thanks for the money, now here's your bug". If the bug sto
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I think the point is their policy is encouraging developers to leave buggy code out in the wild. I fully understand the MS position, but they need to come up with another billing model for recertification.
Re:Why should MSFT work free because he fucked up? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is their policy is encouraging developers to leave buggy code out in the wild. I fully understand the MS position, but they need to come up with another billing model for recertification.
I'd think it would be the other way around - the high price to put out patches means you'll test much better before releasing a patch, so you won't have to do it multiple times.
Which is what this guy didn't - his initial patch (which he paid for) broke things, and now he balks at paying the costs for putting out a second patch to fix his first broken patch.
I don't normally have sympathy for Microsoft, but in this case, I think the rage should be against the developer who refuses to pay the price to fix something HE broke - a price he already knew about beforehand, and which wouldn't have been an issue if he hadn't broken things with his patch.
Who loses on his stinginess (or bad testing procedures) are the "very few" users who are left in the cold. I hope he at least will refund them the cost of the game, but based on what attitude he displays, I doubt it.
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More generally, fear of having to pay for a mistake encourages people to either hide or ignore a mistake. This doesn't make it any less silly for Microsoft to subsidize other peoples' mistakes. Also, MS *will* have to re-verify the newly corrected patch. Why should verification be free this time?
Maybe MS could lower the cost of verifica
Re:Why should MSFT work free because he fucked up? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just another forseeable consequence of the absence of software freedom on the platform. Every author and distributor of non-free software should be scolded every time their policies cause problems. Both Microsoft and Fish are in the wrong.
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Every author and distributor of non-free software should be scolded every time their policies cause problems.
How would you propose funding the development of a game that is not massively multiplayer and is distributed under a free software license? See previous comments by turbidostato [slashdot.org] and alexo [slashdot.org]. And how would you recommend getting people to buy boxes designed to play such free games and hook them up to their TVs?
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He should have just released it on the PC instead. It has a much larger built-in audience, and doesn't cost anything in licensing/patching fees. It really serves him right for siding with some outdated set-top box.
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Most of the fee is supposedly for quality control. If MS let the bug slip through in the original release or the first patch, they share part of the blame.
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Sorry but that's just fucking ridiculous given they probably don't even pay a tester that as a annual wage.
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My guess is that Microsoft set the price point high to avoid the PS3 problem, where every time you turn the damn thing on it has some patch that needs you to r
Yep... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
HTPC is the answer (Score:2)
Re:HTPC is the answer (Score:4, Interesting)
It's probably what they are actually doing.
Re:Yep... (Score:4, Insightful)
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This methodology of releasing buggy software too early and patching arose from Microprose. They would release their (excellent) games and then send you floppies with patches, or allow access to patches on their BBS. At the time, we thought it was great because of the attention that the developer was giving games that you'd already paid for. Little did we realize at the time what a horrible thing this would turn into.
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Too bad (Score:2)
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.
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Releasing patches does cost money in the company, and it does come out of that group's budget. I am not aware of anyone ever losing their bonus over a patch, although seeing how bonuses for us peons are tied to your performance review, if someone really messed up on a patch it could effect their performance review and thus, their bonus. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at some point managed to lose their salary (ie. fire
To be a little more fair. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 $40k to debug and troubleshoot the game *ITSELF*.
Of course, if he'd released this on Steam or even entirely independently on his own site, he could patch to his heart's content.
At any rate, Phil Fish is a controversial character, but I dig the guy and hope this all settles out in the end. Hopefully he moves on to greener pastures with his next game (or, even, with this one as soon as the exclusivity breaks).
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As many have stated, the point of the patch fee isn't to make money (though it doesn't hurt on that front). Its to make sure the consoles don't end up like PCs where games are often nowhere close to being in a "releasable state" at launch. Its a "tax/penalty" for releasing shitty code and to force devs to test their stuff.
"mis-conception" (Score:4, Insightful)
The walled garden is designed specifically to make sure Microsoft makes money on every transaction, no matter how insignificant. That's why UEFI is going to kill the PC... if the platform is locked, you're screwed. But at least Microsoft will be making money... so it's all good. As long as corporations control everything, we shouldn't worry.
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You know, I kept hearing that every version of MS's "anti-piracy" measures for Vista, and Win7 were uncrackable too. Seemed to me that every version was cracked like a egg being dropped from a 12 story building, some were elegant cracks, some were brute forced like being smashed with a hammer. UEFI? I expect the same thing, I do. It may take time, but it will come. Persistence is the key.
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The problem here is that, according to TFA, the developer pocketed about 1 million dollars in sales. If he even gets to keep 30% of that, after paying fees and commissions to Microsoft and taxes, it's about 300,000 US$. I understand that paying (again) a hefty certification fee sucks, but certainly we're not talking about a teenager working out of his basement.
Windows RT is the exact opposite (Score:2)
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.
Tough? (Score:3)
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.
Some genres (Score:2)
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.
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Then don't make a fighting game.
Seriously.
This is business. If you can't handle the rules and costs for working with microsoft and XBLA then don't work with them, and make a game you can sell somewhere else.
I make strategy games (or at least, parts of strategy games for other people, and do academic work on strategy games), console releases aren't worth the effort because controllers suck for most of what I work on these days. So you know full well that you aren't going to hit a big chunk of the gaming ma
This is a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
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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What do you think XBox certification is for? You're paying MS 10s of thousands to test your stuff and make sure it doesn't break.
Looks like MS failed to do their testing properly, and want this guy to pay for them to test again.
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You've hit it on the head.
Consoles are not a place to update games on a regular basis. That's what computers are for.
XBLive games can have updates, but they *should* be painfully expensive to prevent the constant downloading of patches that developers would otherwise make. Get it right and then publish, as opposed to publish fast and update frequently.
Mismatch of expectations for curation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
the 20 year perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Game Boy (Score:2)
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 [quartertothree.com].
There's always a price to pay for lack of testing (Score:4, Informative)
Then do it right the first time (Score:2)
He knew this was an issue before signing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
The real problem (Score:2)
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.
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So have those who actually produce working games the first time sbusidise those who release garbage that needs to be patched later?
You shoulda known (Score:2)
Sloppy Work (Score:2, Troll)
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.
Progress (Score:2)
Leave it to the game console market, to make it so that the Internet is too expensive a medium, for distributing software updates.
Microsoft should be paying them (Score:2)
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.
Toll Gate (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a problem with any locked in system where 1 source controlls the Toll Gate to the only entrance.
Desks, mice, and keyboards (Score:2)
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So long as a mandatory effect of "hacking" your box is that it is immediately blacklisted by the online gaming networks.
Oh wait, that's exactly what happens.
Re:For real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:For real? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:For real? (Score:4, Funny)
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The only thing it "deters" is the release of needed, timely patches.
You mean like his first patch, the one causing saved game files to appear corrupted?
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Yes, publishers rushing out buggy games then trying to blame the console maker does piss me off.
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So let me get this staright. This guy pushes out a buggy game, then pushes out a patch to fix the previously bug game yet it breaks other things. Microsoft then pulls the patch to save others from downlading a buggy patch. In conclusion, somehow this is Microsoft's fault?
Re:For real? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:For real? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:For real? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:For real? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't like the idea of games being released "broken" with intentions of fixing it after release, but artificially making it extremely expensive or impossible to patch something is a double-edged sword.
I can't remember a game in the last ten years that didn't have something wrong with it (arguably, a near-impossibility with modern game complexity), and timely, free fixes have been welcome for that.
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.
Re:For real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:For real? (Score:4)
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.
I like that idea. Perhaps tempered with a hockey-stick curve for the little guys. $1k for your first two (or whatever, I'm being a bit arbitrary) then start ramping up sharply to make it seriously cost prohibitive?
Re:For real? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you make it expensive to patch, then there will be no patches... That doesn't mean games will actually be released any less buggy, just that there will never be any patches for them.
Re:For real? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Separation of Concerns (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:For real? (Score:4, Insightful)
If he had put out good code to begin with, none of this would be an issue.
If his patch hadn't screwed up the customers' save files, none of this would be an issue.
I don't blame MS for saying he needs to re-certify his code because his code seems to be pretty crappy.
What do YOU think certification means? (Score:2)
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21464 [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Their certification is not QA.
Re:For real? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the guy blames Microsoft after being the one pushing out a faulty patch to begin with? LOLWUT?
Something does not add up; a patch was produced for the game with apparently no fanfare regarding the cost for "recertification," and then when it was revealed that a bug still existed (albeit in an apparently hard-to-spot corner case) only then did he go ballistic and cry foul? He must have known about this "extortionate" fee beforehand, so why only complain after a bug he put in the software made him pay it twice?
Re:For real? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For real? (Score:4, Funny)
Because as with all good pushers the first patch is free. Subsequent patches cost $40K to recertify. At least that's what the voices in my heard said they overhead someone else tell another person.
If that's the case then I kind of do blame Microsoft. Making the first one free is clearly too low of a burden for devs to take seriously. They throw a bunch of bug fixes into the patch and then release it to the world, and don't really think "if i missed just one thing then this is going to get real expensive real fast". 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. That way devs can get the first few out the door while still grasping the seriousness of what's going on.
I mean, think of it from Microsoft's perspective: If you had devs come out with a new patch like every single Tuesday, wouldn't you be pissed off at all the extra work you had to do?
Re:For real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:For real? (Score:4, Funny)
I've heard this expression, but where do you find these pushers? It seems to me there's enough pushers out there you could just move from one to the other getting free drugs for as long as you want, totally ideal. All the pushers I see aren't good enough I suppose.
Re:For real? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Arcade vs. Indie Games (Score:3)
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.