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.
Ozmodan wrote on Jul 21, 2012, 15:05:
Oh give me a break, Microsoft is the 800 lb gorilla in this case and it is absurd to charge an indie 40k+ for a patch.
The only bad guy here is Microsoft as the developer made the game exclusive for their box.
The problem here is drawing the line at one patch, when Microsoft needs to be a bit more flexible. If the game was on Steam it would have been No issue at all.
I have no sympathy for any writer that tries to make out Microsoft the good guy in any way shape or form. He is an IDIOT!