Fez developer Polytron has said that it won't be updating the patch for Fez despite it corrupting save data for some players.
In a statement posted on the Polytron website, the developer explains that the bug affects "less than 1%" of players, and that Microsoft's certification process means that updating it would cost more money than the company can afford.
"The save file delete bug only happens to less than a percent of players," says the post from regularly-controversial creator Phil Fish. "It's a shitty numbers game to be playing for sure, but as a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL. especially when you consider the alternative. Had FEZ been released on steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away too!
"We believe the save file corruption issue mostly happened to players who had completed, or almost completed the game. If you hadn't already seen most of what FEZ had to offer, your save file is probably safe. It doesn't happen if you start a new game. We believe the current patch is safe for an overwhelming majority of players."
"The patch fixes almost everything that's been wrong with the game since launch. The framerate issues, the loading, the skips, the death loops, everything! All that stuff is fixed! And right now, nobody can get to it since the patch was pulled. For 99% of people, it makes FEZ a better game. To the less-than-1% who are getting screwed, we sincerely apologize. We know this hurts you the most, because you're the ones who put the most times into the game. And this breaks our hearts. We hope you don't think back on your time spent in FEZ as a total waste."
"Microsoft gave us a choice: either pay a ton of money to re-certify the game and issue a new patch (which for all we know could introduce new issues, for which we'd need yet another costly patch), or simply put the patch back online. They looked into it, and the issue happens so rarely that they still consider the patch to be "good enough"."
"It wasn't an easy decision, but in the end, paying such a large sum of money to jump through so many hoops just doesn't make any sense. We already owe microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform. People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM. So we're going to go ahead and put Title Update back online, and for a vast majority of people it's going to make FEZ a better game."
Fish has previously said that it'll cost $40,000 to certify another patch, a figure that's also been cited by Double Fine head Tim Schafer. This is part of Microsoft's standard and somewhat contentious rules for Xbox Live releases, which are designed to minimise the number of patches released and ensure that everything that goes on the service has been tested by its own certification team.
It's an understandable strategy, says Fish, but not a workable one. ""It's in place to ensure there's a certain level of quality in the games," he said at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona, as reported by Giant Bomb. "They don't want games to be constantly patched all the time, and I understand the reasoning for that, but god damnit, it takes forever, it costs a fortune--you have to pay them for it--and it doesn't work."
16 comments so far...
Bezza89 on 19 Jul '12 said:
Quite frankly if the game was fixed in the first place you wouldn't need to patch it - I find Microsofts patching fee a great idea if it makes developers release games that are bug free.
Of course it's bad for people affected and it's a reason we see dlc priced so much but a deterrent to buggy games is all well and good in my eyes.
I know it's a controversial thing to say but it's kind of how I feel, there's far too many people who think they can just patch things up later.
sonicmark on 19 Jul '12 said:
What was this bug meant to do? I read about the save file corruption but does it mean that it can just delete itself or what?
Travadonna on 19 Jul '12 said:
This guy has been mad since he found out that Microsoft gave Minecraft special treatment. Notch broke a deal with MS to get free updates for the game.
OXM Jonty on 19 Jul '12 said:
I think Minecraft's a special case because they knew the game was going to be different by the time they released it - so 4J would have to port one version over first (which was current at the time they started development) then add the remaining updates after that.
Presumably it'll stop at some point. No idea when, mind.
Grummy on 19 Jul '12 said:
Minecraft is an entirely different situation, everyone knows that. Any developers bitching about it really need to get over it. Minecraft is unique in that it is still recognized as a game in development, the regular patches and updates are part of the package. Microsoft wanted minecraft on XBLA and they had to accept that this was the package. Every other XBLA game, when released, is released as a finished product, everything should work the way it is, the game you have is the one the developers wanted to make. If its released and needs a patch, it means they haven't done a good enough job of bug testing it, which is the whole point of the fee for patches. Minecraft, as has been said, is a different story, even though the game we have is perfectly functional and playable to the fullest, part of its cycle is new updates that add and change things, Microsoft could never charge for that if they wanted the game on Live.
Lancer Armstrong on 19 Jul '12 said:
Sure, Microsoft's policy makes sense, I guess.
But as a gamer, I'd much rather have a game that works than one that doesn't.
If I was one of those 1%, I'd be furious.
At the end of the day, it's about keeping your paying customers happy, surely.
skellen79 on 19 Jul '12 said:
I'm sure that after such a drawn-out development, Mr Fish wants nothing more than for his masterpiece to be perfect. If I had spent five years making something mostly on my own, only to have a few users experiences be tarnished by such a petty issue, I would definately be re-thinking my release platform for any future projects. Personally i'm just glad that he got it released at all.
It does seem that if the future is indeed digital, then MS are going to have to make sure that their star independant developers are happy. This is not the first report of dissatisfaction that i have read from Indie devs who have released on the 360, which is terrible as most of my favourite experiences on Xbox over the last three years has been due to Live arcade titles. As MS seem content to hide the games on their games machine, and the big publishers rely on formulae to produce most of their big titles, Live Arcade is the last bastion of originality on the 360.
CunningSmile on 19 Jul '12 said:
Most of the complaints over the years have been similar to this one, which lets face it basically boils down to "My game didn't work as it was supposed to and now MS are charging me/essentially fining me because of it."
Not many cases I side with MS but I think they have a point, otherwise everyone would release shonky untested games because they can just keep patching them. If that happened it wouldn't just be the developers getting a bad reputation but MS as well, and a reputation is a hard thing to recover.
skellen79 on 19 Jul '12 said:
I do agree that MS need to draw the line to ensure quality levels, but when you have AAA titles like Skyrim, which I love, being released in almost Beta form, it reduces these standards in my eyes quite radically. The 360 was supposed to be the machine which brought codeing back into the hands of the few, and the Arcade and Indie games have indeed been successful. However due to the restrictions that are in place before a game can be released on Live, MS are expecting the smaller teams to work in the same way as much larger devs, which can only force people like Polytron to start considering alternatives.
I just personally feel a case of 'Older Child' syndrome nowadays. They are understandably looking to the new customers for direction, yet as a long-standing customer, I feel i'm being ignored. To me, the whole Xbox experience feels worse now than it did before all of the Kinect integration into the core operations of the system. The Windows 8-unifying revamp to the dashboard, the removal of Inside Xbox, the then ironic reduced server efficency due to the increase in video streaming, plus greater restrictions to the Indie devs compared to the competition (it has always been this way but developers have recently been more vocal in their criticisms).
I'm bitchin' I know, but I used to adore every minute after I turned on my machine. Now, not so much.
Maybe i'm just burned out after such a long cycle this time around.
I want the new machine fast lol
Spiderless on 19 Jul '12 said:
There are other ways to ensure quality than to fee the crap out of small independent game developers.
Take Steam as an example, its updates are free and the devs have to cater to millions of different PC configurations, yet as far as I can tell there really isn't much of a quality problem. And when, inevitably, a bug does arise (no game is flawless) it can be patched quickly and easily rather than spending months hopping through MS' money loops.
Grummy on 19 Jul '12 said:
I'm sorry, but the moment you brought Skyrim into this, you lost all credibility. A game like Skyrim can NEVER be used as an example in situations like this as the sheer volume of work that would go into making a completely bug free experience would mean the game would never be released. Calling Skyrim a Beta game is beyond ludicrous. It wasn't broken, everything worked, and had few bugs, far fewer than previous open world games have had. Personally, I had one glitch that I can remember, and it wasn't gamebreaking or problematic in any way, shape or form.
skellen79 on 20 Jul '12 said:
Well Grummy you were very lucky, my experiences with Skyrim have been very love/hate. I have had LOTS of issues with it causing me to have to restart over four times due to pervasive game breaking flaws. I have lost more than 300 hours of combined gameplay. Out of all of my issues, not a single one that i had destroy my progress has been featured among the frankly massive bug fix list that accompanies each patch. As far as my experiences have shown me, it was nearer to beta than gold.
Grummy on 20 Jul '12 said:
Not to be a pedant, but I'm going to turn this around on you and say that, in fact, you have been extraordinarily unlucky. I'm not in the minority here, I dare say that the majority of players have had the same experience as I did, with very very few problems, and none of them game breaking. So far this gen, of playing all of Bethesda's offerings, I've never had the kind of problems some others seem to have had. I had the gamecrashing bug in Oblivion that everyone had, and the occasional problem of falling through or being stuck in scenery and some late loading textures, the worst culprit was New Vegas, but seeing as it was made by Obsidian, that's not all that surprising. Point being, across 4 games this gen, I've had a handful of small problems and one larger one that everyone had. I have never had the reams of problems other people have complained about. Have I been astronomically lucky? Of course not, it just means that the games aren't too badly made. but they're not perfect and some people have had some bad luck. Either way though, people should never expect a free ride in these games, it can't happen.
skellen79 on 20 Jul '12 said:
Don't you contradict yourself a little there? Anyway, it seems to me to be really harsh for such a small develpoment team to be held up to the same quality standards by MS as the mega teams of say Rockstar or Bethesda.
Bezza89 on 20 Jul '12 said:
How many copies did Fez sell? Considering there's only two guys who made it, and therefore all profit from the game goes to only those two guys and MS take their cut, they should be pretty rich. Not like the Mega teams of R* and Bethesda with all the salaries, engine licenses (havok etc), QA, advertising and small profits from games due to other costs included with distributing games at retailers, preowned sales etc...
A little exaggerative perhaps, but you see my point, the only thing stopping this patch happening is Mr Fish's greed.
Grummy on 20 Jul '12 said:
I did, but it was an accident, I deleted a passage whilst I was writing and it read like I said something I didn't actually mean, fixed it now.