Microsoft Deflects Responsibility Over Fez Patch Problems

I can understand both parties, to be honest. Maybe MS should look into scaling the update prices according to size or sales numbers (Activision, for example, should be paying more for updating the millions of COD copies than some small developer who only sold a fraction of what COD usually sells).

But man does Fish have a talent for making himself look bad whenever he opens his mouth.

wow i never knew they had to pay cash to make a title update..that just sounds very dumb

Oh god It's impossible to counter the ignorance that's in all of the Fez news post comments because the quantity of mis-assumption & temporal differences in Phil Fish himself is being ignored (meaning that he's grown up over time and understands what shit he's said).

I feel that what has been lost in all this discussion and reporting is that apparently, if you are starting new on the current patched version of the game, the save deletion glitch won't occur. So, good for people who didn't buy it before the patch, I suppose. I'd rather see it on a different platform, of course. I can think of a few that could handle the game easily and wouldn't be subject to the same level of pointless closed platform restrictions.

It's unfortunate that Polytron and Microsoft won't sort things out for the core fans of the game. But we really have no sure data about what the 'work together on it' price would be for Fez to get a second title update. $20k? Free? I'm sure it's all very NDA'ed up. It's amazing we know about the $40k standard price in the first place.

Phil Fish is a douche bag and a moron.. Will never buy any of his games..

@MattClassic said:

Phil Fish was the dude that said his game was console-only because you're supposed to play it on your TV with a gamepad while sitting on a couch, right?

I don't have an opinion on this he-said she-said thing going on between him and MS, but goddamn is that a dumb argument. Tons of people play PC games like that. I do it all the time and I don't consider myself to be super tech-savvy or anything. These days it takes about as much time and effort as setting up an actual console.

Probably less hassle to set up because you don't have to put up with Microsoft's current and horrendous 360 dash, where advertisements and "apps" come first, gaming last.

I'm in the "he has had two attempts at getting this thing to work properly and still couldn't do it, so tough shit, pay up" camp.

Find it amusing that he has a dig at Japanese games development, yet they are the best at releasing games which don't need patching imo.

Funny seeing people say how games are more complex these days. So make your QA more rigorous to compensate. If he had released a game in DS or PSP he would have been royally screwed (or rather his customers would - which doesn't seem to worry him too much)

Getting somewhat tired of the 'should have made the game work the first time like in the old days' bullshit. Games were much simpler then, and fewer things could go wrong. Now they have a lot of moving parts and it's difficult to know what'll happen until lots of people are playing it. Even with testing, some stuff always gets through.

I can't think of ANY recent release that hasn't had to go though some level of patching. Having a simple, inexpensive patching process means that developers can continue to support their game after the release (which they really want to do, because they don't WANT the game to have any serious issues!) which is a fucking win for consumers, but some of us choose to complain about it anyway.

When we released the last patch for our game, we made a small fix to the game to help out a tiny minority of people who have their windows font set to something other than 'black' who were having some problems reading the text in the game. Mainly affecting visually impaired people using high contrast desktop themes. It was an oversight by us, and cleaning up the code to make sure everyone saw black text made sense, even though the problem could be fixed by users changing their windows font colour while playing. After we released the patch, we started getting bug reports where in a very small number of cases, people were now unable to see text at all. Weird! We didn't experience this on any of our computers and couldn't reproduce it, but apparently it was a thing, and it couldn't be fixed by the user, so we had to reverse that small change we made and just tell people to make sure to set their windows font to a dark colour before playing. If we'd had a problem of a similar scale on an XBLA game, we'd be down $80,000 by now for finding that out.

@Shady said:

@big_jon said:

Can someone explain to me all the hate for Phil Fish?

Is it because of his awesome name?

My understanding is he acts like a jerk when he opens his mouth.

Dammit, I may be a jerk. He's sounds like he's being honest to me, not so much a jerk.

But you're right Shady, that's the rep he has.

He's a dude who said that "PCs are for spreadsheets". Now he's bitching about how they should have released FEZ on PC and Steam.

It's not honesty like Jaffe's or Schafer's - they both make bold and sometimes insulting statements, but you can be pretty sure they'll either stand by their word, back it up or confront others about them.

Phil Fish sounds like Perez Hilton.

Phil Fish was the dude that said his game was console-only because you're supposed to play it on your TV with a gamepad while sitting on a couch, right?

I don't have an opinion on this he-said she-said thing going on between him and MS, but goddamn is that a dumb argument. Tons of people play PC games like that. I do it all the time and I don't consider myself to be super tech-savvy or anything. These days it takes about as much time and effort as setting up an actual console.

"According to Polytron, less than a 1% of Fez players are vulnerable to the bug in the original patch. The bug specifically affects saves from completed games, or near-completed games."

LOL pretty fked up

@vinsanityv22 said:

Phil Fish took 18 years to bring this game to XBLA, and

18 years?

Phil Fish took 18 years to bring this game to XBLA, and talked loads of shit on other (far more efficient) developers and games the entire time.

For my money, I'm sticking with Microsoft. Fuck this guy. I don't care how good the game may be; this guy's douchiness has tainted the hell out of it. I know it's prohibitively expensive to release games on XBLA for indie developers, and that getting patches and updates done to games takes a whoooooole lot longer than, say, on Steam. But I've never heard anyone complain that putting out a patch costs a ton of money. Well, until the article mentioned something about Tim Schafer saying it's 40k (which seems ridiculous; no game should've been updated on the 360 ever for those prices).

Odds are, this guy is full of shit, and wants to wash his hands of this thing already. If he takes as long to make his next game as he did Fez, than he's looking at another 6 years for development on that. Why waste some of that time polishing up this game?

@egg said:

"We remain huge fans of Fez."

What an abstract pandering comment. If you're huge fans, how come you don't pay for the update?

That's about as useful as saying "Why didn't Polytron make a perfect game and then release it?" No offense to you for making the statement. It's just it isn't Microsoft's responsibility to make arrangements to off-set the costs related to game development pre- and post-launch for the games they don't publish. More importantly, Fish and Polytron had to know about the costs of the updates prior to making arrangements to release the game on XBLA. I don't buy this nonsense that Fish and Polytron were apparently blindsided by the cost. If they were, they are terrible business people who didn't understand the marketplace they were releasing their product on. That's their fault and not Microsoft's.

EDIT: Just to be clear, the cost for patching the game seems crazy high. But that's another discussion.

The reason why both parties are the wrong:

- Bugs happen because software is complex and the platform it runs on can be complex.

- $80,000 is a lot of money just to distribute a fix to a bug of almost any class.

Neither the software cost or the hardware is worth that much money. Both Fish and Microsoft have to share blame because we are in a situation where it makes just as much to keep the flaw unpatched.

Just watch as Phil Fish backtracks on his stance that this should stay a console game in the coming year when Fez eventually gets its release on PC. He's a huge asshole who would have benefited from having someone else speak for him when it comes to PR.

https://twitter.com/PHIL_FISH/statuses/95911109667733504

This little quip sums up his horrible attitude towards customer service and his elitist attitude towards his game. The responder was joining in on speculation that it would eventually see a PC release in the far future. Phil will eventually prove him right and he has been far from professional about such matters.

@Sammo21 said:

@Grissefar: You know people who say "first" in posts mostly show people they are dicks, right? Also, saying "first" doesn't net you the achievement anyway, even though you stated you already had.

Personally I think they should ban people from commenting when they do the whole "first" thing.

Ha ! Ha !

I guess it rubbed you the wrong way huh. As the only one. Not even Alex got pissed, since I was pretty graceful about it.

The only sucky part is that I saw this story on Joystiq and they "mistakenly" did not include a link to your site. If it was not an accident, that would be a dick move on their part.

At this point Microsoft should just give the guy a free patch and stop the future of throwing poop.

@Grissefar: You know people who say "first" in posts mostly show people they are dicks, right? Also, saying "first" doesn't net you the achievement anyway, even though you stated you already had.

Personally I think they should ban people from commenting when they do the whole "first" thing.

@egg said:

"We remain huge fans of Fez."

What an abstract pandering comment. If you're huge fans, how come you don't pay for the update?

They aren't going to make an exception just because. Polytron already used their one free patch. The next one had to be paid for unless they could somehow sweet-talk Microsoft into letting them push a second one for free. Fish's mouth, however, is not up to that task.

"We remain huge fans of Fez."

What an abstract pandering comment. If you're huge fans, how come you don't pay for the update?

well look at me. mr. less than %1 here, yep im boned. just about 99% done too. thanks polytron. i doubt youll offer anything to we the ppl who were boned.

Phil Fish has enough money on his own to easily pay for the patch while hardly batting an eye. But he'd rather blame Microsoft, cuz that's what Fish does. And what's sad is he's duped the majority of the gaming community into taking his side. He could honestly post a kickstarter and get more than enough money to pay for the patch, but he would just take the money and run. He doesn't wanna work on the game anymore; pure and simple.

Microsoft should offer refunds to those affected. Microsoft should recoup that money from all future sales of Fez until paid for.

Interesting retort from Microsoft. I see they call bologna on Phil blaming them for everything.

Frankly i think it's real shitty to leave your game broken. Even if it is for 1% of users. Fez sold a ton it's going to be ported to other systems and it will no doubt sell even more. The guys made a lot of money out of it but wont spend some of that money fixing his game?

It reeks of him just being a greedy drama queen. To see how worked up he got in indie game the movie over fez about it being perfect and now he's suddenly not too fussed when it costs him money? Guys just a douche. Never had this problem with meat boy, braid or limbo to name a few. Hell castle crashers had it's issues you never saw those guys refuse to fix there shit.

You brush this off and take his side but ask yourself this; how many XBLA games are broken? I can't think of any. No other dev on there has had an issue putting out patches. If it does cost 40k it would seem the majority take it on the chin and the majority wont have sold as well as Fez.

I don't understand how you can take what Phil Fish says at face value, Patrick. Just his dealings with his partner over the indie game movie proves to me that he's a drama queen and that everything is everyone else's fault, not his.

@Pinworm45 said:

@pw2566ch said:

@Superanos said:

What are Fez's sales numbers? If the game was a big success, they could afford the $40k easily.

That's not the point. I understand $40k chump change to a high selling game, but no company should have to dish out that much just to upload a patch. Not even EA and Activision.

I wonder if it's the same amount to upload a patch on PSN and Steam.

Uh, why shouldn't they? If they don't, Microsoft has to eat the bandwidth costs (and remember, everyone who plays the game, at least with internet (which you need to get it..) get the update, so why should microsoft eat those bandwidth costs?

Especially given that they DO eat the bandwidth costs for the first patch.

Also, they need to run tests and make sure the game won't cause any problems to the system, so they have to pay employees to do that for every update, in addition to the bandwidth to send out updates, updating their servers with the new stuff, etc. Why should they be responsible because someone released a broken game? It's their responsibility to make sure it's not, and frankly it's generous of Microsoft to allow one free update.

I mean seriously, why should Microsoft be paying for someone elses mistakes? Especially when THEY SIGNED A CONTRACT ACKNOWLEDGING THESE COSTS AT THE START. They could have declined and moved to another system that wouldn't charge any fees (hint: they all do).

Why does everyone think bandwidth costs a shit ton of money. If that was the case, don't you think that every console and every download distributor (Steam, Gamestop, Origin) would apply the same methods? Hell, if that was the case, then PSN should start charging their users $60 a year as well. Or maybe Steam should stop having sales.

But hey, they're a company and they know that it would only cost $40k to distribute a 20MB patch (small game so I'm assuming it's a small patch) to the millions of people that bought the game.

Not sure why people believe Phil Fish when he shoots his mouth off anyway. He's dishonest and an attention whore, and he has an excuse for everything.

@Alex said:

According to Polytron, less than a 1% of Fez players are vulnerable to the bug in the original patch. The bug specifically affects saves from completed games, or near-completed games.

Not a good sign when only 1% of your fans are even close to completing your game.

System testing like this is great but both of them need to be honest that this level of testing and fee automatically makes it hard for entire classes of games impossible to release on XBox Live.

@Shady said:

@big_jon said:

Can someone explain to me all the hate for Phil Fish?

Is it because of his awesome name?

My understanding is he acts like a jerk when he opens his mouth.

Dammit, I may be a jerk. He's sounds like he's being honest to me, not so much a jerk.

But you're right Shady, that's the rep he has.

@big_jon said:

Can someone explain to me all the hate for Phil Fish?

Is it because of his awesome name?

My understanding is he acts like a jerk when he opens his mouth.

I hope that out there, somewhere, Phil Fish is sitting at a bar making moody dialogues about Microsoft.

@Dixavd said:

@Pinworm45 said:

Also, they need to run tests and make sure the game won't cause any problems to the system, so they have to pay employees to do that for every update

I just want to point out how hilarious that line is in context; if only Microsoft was actually successful at doing that.

They are? I mean I assume you think it's funny because of RROD but that's an entirely different department. Tests have to be run to make sure software updates won't put the system in a loop or otherwise damage it. As far as I know, no updates have broken the system, so they're doing a decent job I'd say..

@Brodehouse said:

@takkun169 said:

The question that this entire situation brings up is "What is Microsoft's certification process for?" The certification process takes weeks and they didn't catch the problem, so what was that time spent on? If they say your first patch is free and then they certify it even though it has an issue with it, that seems like it was Microsoft's fuck up, or they let it through so that they could get paid on top of their cut of what the game makes. It's a shame because the game is fantastic but as usual Microsoft is out for self, and not sensible or flexible with the rules and guidelines they put in place.

It's to make sure that your game doesn't mess up people's consoles or Live experience, to make sure the game doesn't flip out and bring the whole thing down if you plug in a plastic guitar. It's not to run QA on game saves or to check frame rate, or collision detection, or random crashes. It's just to make sure the game doesn't brick consoles or refuse to bring up the guide menu.

@Hurricrane said:

I can see both sides of the issue, the cost is meant to prevent broken games (like New Vegas, that worked out) but is easily circumvented if they have enough money (like New Vegas).

No, it has nothing to do with cleaning up bugs or fixing broken quests. It's just to make sure that New Vegas doesn't make the 360 incapable of connecting to Live or incapable of returning to the home menu.

This. A million times this. As someone that's actually done certification testing, the main thing I was told on my first day was that our job is to verify that the games we test pass the criteria required for release. That meant that testing was mostly comprised of:

• Verifying that disc-read and system errors were handled correctly.
• Verifying that system-level menus (ex: 360 Dashboard, XMB, Wii Home Menu) were properly implemented.
• Verifying that audio channels are being used correctly.
• Verifying that the game is displayed in the correct aspect ratio.
• Verifying tests related to saving/loading (interrupting saves in process, etc.)
• Verifying that the game does not screw up if left on for an extended period of time.
• Limited gameplay testing, in which catastrophic issues that are found can result in a certification failure.
• Testing the online functions to make sure that they comply with the console network standards.
• And so on.

Note on this last point that I say limited testing. This does not mean that certification will play through an entire game start to finish. I know what the policies were at the company I cert tested for years ago when I was doing it, but I was not testing at Microsoft and thus have no idea what their standards for this level of testing are. I do, however, believe that it's a safe bet that they are not required to play through the entire game. If they had to play every game thy certified from start to finish, they wouldn't have time for anything else. Certification testing does not take two months. It might take a day at most, save for any overnight tests that need to get done.

What certification does not do, is QA a developer's game. The bug in the Fez patch that may result in complete or near complete game saves corrupting came in an unfortunate area of the game that existed outside the scope of the certification process. It is not Microsoft's fault that the bug was not found. It's not necessarily Polytron's either, because it's a rare case that requires save files to be in a specific state of completion. It's a scenario that could have been very easy to miss, and that's unfortunate for all involved.

What none of this excuses, however, is Fish's tendency to mouth off in public forums. He is not a PR person. He does not have the personality for it. He may be a brilliant game designer, but he does not seem hesitant in the least when the opportunity to burn a bridge comes along.

When I heard about the bug I took my console offline so that I could finish the game without it patching and potentially killing my save. As soon as a finished the game I quit out, and reconnected to xbox live, the game patched and now my Fez save file is dead. It sucks because if they pushed the update a couple of weeks ago and kept it up I would have been able to avoid the problem as the bug wouldn't have affected me. So in a way I got the worst of it. I had to play through the whole game without the patch which would have fixed a few bugs, then when I did get the patch it killed my save. This whole situation is kinda shitty and to be honest, I wouldn't have taken Phil Fish to have been the kind of guy who would let money get in the way of his masterpiece.

How is this in any way microsoft's fault? They let Polytron release the first patch for free, and it ended up causing problems. Of course they aren't going to do that again.

@mbkish: Also, the 40k thing wasn't anything to do with Fish. He just pulled that out of his ass. and it makes sense when MS has things like cert to make sure the patch isn't just breaking things horribly, etc. MS does a lot more than just make people pay for the right to be on the service, they are very involved in the process. That makes things expensive, but it's how they chose to do business, and Fish knew that all along.

Can someone explain to me all the hate for Phil Fish?

Is it because of his awesome name?

@DJJoeJoe said:

Microsoft doesn't seem to want to turn their entire Live and general online service around right now, opting to wait for their next large push with their new upcoming console in 1-2 years or whatever. That's fine, right now though there's some growing pains because the online gaming scene has sort of grown because of what Live started but it's quickly grown out of those shoes and needs a set of new ones.. and could have used them last year even. Mom is opting to not buy new fucking shoes for tommy every few months, instead telling him to suck it up and wait till next school year. Tommy is sad, but mommy don't give a shit cause he will forget once he gets the new shoes.

No offence, who is Mom and Tommy in this allegory? I'm not very smart. :]

Microsoft doesn't seem to want to turn their entire Live and general online service around right now, opting to wait for their next large push with their new upcoming console in 1-2 years or whatever. That's fine, right now though there's some growing pains because the online gaming scene has sort of grown because of what Live started but it's quickly grown out of those shoes and needs a set of new ones.. and could have used them last year even. Mom is opting to not buy new fucking shoes for tommy every few months, instead telling him to suck it up and wait till next school year. Tommy is sad, but mommy don't give a shit cause he will forget once he gets the new shoes.

Everyone is making this look like some sort of war between Fish and Microsoft. They're really just stating the situations. Neither one of them is blaming the other. Phil was basically all like, "I mean... it sucks, but we can't patch again cuz it's just too expensive you know? It's just the way it is." And then everyone was like "OHHH MANN PHIL'S HATIN' ON MICROSOFT. RAACE WARR." and then Microsoft was like "no no no.. like. It's all cool. We're cool with each other, people. There's no problem. We tried working things out, but it ended up not working out." And now the internet is like "AWW PHIL IS JUST AN ASSHOLE BLAHBLABBEDYBLAH" when in reality it's not really a big deal. Fez is still an amazing game, and that's all that really matters.

@Demoskinos said:

@Krakn3Dfx If I could point you to a source I would I do remember reading an article last year sometime that covered this exact issue. That was the first time I heard about the costs involved with patching. Can't blame you if you dont believe me I dont have a on-hand source but I do remember reading that.

That's cool, I often find myself in the same situation, read something and can't remember/figure out where. Stupid internets! :)

I typed "Phil Fish is" into Google and laughed heartily at the suggested results.
 This lead me to his Twitter where I found this gem.
PHIL FISH ‏ PHIL_FISH

alex_navarro and what exactly have you shipped, alex? (testing doesn't count) 
 
Don't know anything about the guy, but it doesn't seem he's very well liked.

@AnEternalEnigma said:

Phil Fish is a goddamn idiot. It warms my heart to see him get humiliated like this.

I feel all tingly inside.

@Conojo: I'd be interested in seeing that movie for sure.. But unfortunately I think I missed it's theatrical viewing schedule because I've never once seen a listing for it at any movie theater in my area. I think my best bet is to wait until it's available on Netflix.. I have the Canadian Netflix though so it might take a while.

@ERoBB I don't think Microsoft's policy is right, I think it's totally fucked, but I'm also tired of hearing about indies devs whining about the entire thing, especially when the ones who've been the loudest (Team Meat, J Blow) have made bank off of it regardless. My point is mother fucker has a job and it just so happens his job is making consumer products that people expect to work. Whatever excuses he comes up with about how his product functions are just that, excuses.

And way to take it to a personal level with the petty insults, kid.

@dennisthemennis If I made a bunch of money and had people paying for my product? Yes. Unless dude hardly broke even on Fez, which I doubt, it seems like total bullshit. I've had jobs go fucking haywire and I've lost money having to pay people to go back and do shit over, but I fucking did it, because people paid me money for a service. Pretty simple.

@Xeirus Alright? I don't remember ever saying I could make a better video game? What the fuck are you talking about?

And just so I don't get any more PM's telling me to "fuck myself" for being, among other things "a indie hater", I played and loved every second of Fez, I just happen to think the dude behind it needs to man up and not place blame for his mistakes elsewhere. Have a great night, gang.

@BlazeHedgehog said:

A programmer from Bungie noted that Microsoft was actually generous enough to give them two free patches over the XBLA release of Marathon with a little sweet talking. But then again, "sweet talking" might not be Phil Fish's strong suit.

You can say that again. Phil Fish's twitter persona makes Jim Redmond or Randy Pitchford seem like Buddhist monks.