Op Ed

GamesIndustry International - Fez, Fish and The Problem with Patching.
Fez has grossed over a million dollars, and even after Microsoft has taken a lump of that, it would be outright negligent and irresponsible of Fish not to have money left over to cover an unforeseen problem like a reissued patch. Catch-22. If you're able to complain about it, you're also able to pay for it, and your users are quite entitled to excoriate you for using them as hostages in a debate with Microsoft which is of no real relevance to them.

"I don't care how indie you are, or how free and loose your ideas of commerce and creativity may be - once you've taken a million bucks from consumers, professionalism isn't optional" Equally, though, one can have sympathy with Microsoft. The company gives one patch for free, and charges for subsequent patches - not because it's greedy and avaricious (it does lots of other things for those reasons, of course), but because it doesn't want to see XBLA games being released buggy or incomplete and patched repeatedly. The Xbox is a console, and players expect not to be confronted with the kind of endless match of bugs and patches which so often afflict PC games. Microsoft has a duty to its consumers to try to enforce that, and ultimately, Fish bears responsibility for creating a patch with such a serious bug in it.

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Re: Op Ed
Jul 21, 2012, 17:56
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Re: Op Ed Jul 21, 2012, 17:56
Jul 21, 2012, 17:56
 
peteham wrote on Jul 21, 2012, 17:43:
While the re-certification fee seems ludicrous, it's not as if Fish went into this completely blind. All of this stuff would've been in the contract, yet he took the deal for XBLA exclusivity. He was also quite vocal about Fez being a console game, yet suddenly PC and the ease of patching on Steam is preferable after all? Hah.

Yeah. While the cost of a patch is ludicrous, it wasn't like this wasn't well known from other developers in the industry. It's possible he is that naive, but there's more than a little bit of angling for leverage in Fish's approach. You almost wonder if Microsoft just calls his bluff and goes "Fine, release it on Steam, see if we care".
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