VargasPrime

@Hailinel said:

Hey, Patrick. Some of us are looking forward to things they did talk about, so I wouldn't whine if I were you.

Yeah Patrick, you should not express your opinions on things in your editorials because some people might not share your... opinions.

Man, I really hope that someone comes to their senses and this makes it to the 3DS eShop.

Great article. I love seeing games take shape, especially ones that I enjoy.

MotN is one of the best games I've played this year, or any year for that matter. It manages to do what no stealth game has done since the original Tenchu games on the PS1, and make you feel completely badass and totally vulnerable at the same time. Every time you do something great, it feels awesome, and every time you screw up, you know it was your fault for being too anxious or not using the tools available to you.

Anyone who didn't play this on XBLA should get it on Steam right now. Don't wait for a sale, don't put it off because other games are coming out. It's worth every cent of the $15 it costs, and it will probably be more satisfying than most games you play this year.

@Olivaw said:

@Grognard66 said:

The hard drive limitations are astounding. It's almost like Nintendo doesn't want consumers to buy games/movies from their online store. Hard Drive's are cheap - Nintendo should be packing in as much as they can to get people to buy more.

Games, yes, they want you to buy those directly from them. Movies, it sounds like those are all streaming through separate services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.). Amazon lets you download movies, but it also allows you to stream them, so why bother with space?

Hell, if Nintendo is smart, they'll offer the same thing. Not streaming, but keeping a library of your purchases to download at any time, so you can just uninstall any time you need space, and reinstall any time you feel like playing New Super Mario Bros. again.

Hard drives are cheap, but what's the biggest iPhone size these days? 64 gigs? And who fills it up? Crazy people, is who.

Current XBLA and PSN games are often in the 1-2 GB range each, let alone full retail games. If Nintendo is planning on offering similar digital marketplace options as the current consoles, 32GB of memory is going to be pitifully limiting.

And who wants to re-download those file sizes constantly in an effort to manage 32GB of storage? I have a 120GB drive on my XBox, and every few months, I have to go through and clean house for new games that I want to download/install.

Kind of indifferent on the Wii U so far, but...

32GB of memory? What year are we in? How do you make a console with no storage capacity with the amount of digital content that is available, and what WILL be available in the months/years to come?

Great interview, Patrick. Love this series, and you can really tell how much heart these guys have for what they do.

Here's to Darksiders III.

Obviously everyone is comparing this to the Phil Fish situation, and with good reason.

But a huge difference is that, while the Fez patch may have borked the save files of a minute percentage of players, leaving the rest unscathed, the Silent Hill collection has completely unavoidable issues for everyone who bought it. There's no getting around the shitty technical glitches in that game.

At least the Fez owners who got screwed by that patch still have a perfectly playable game they can enjoy again. SHHD owners are left with a buggy mess that will never be fixed.

@Humanity: From all accounts I've heard (and several people confirming it here in these comments) any money from direct sales on XBL are not passed on to the developers/publishers until 4 months after the game's release. So it's possible that Polytron has not actually seen any money yet from Fez sales.

And no, we don't know whether it's "can't" as opposed to "won't." But given that Polytron is a young company consisting of two people, and has been working on this one game for 5+ years, I would assume that the money needed for recertification is a pretty big blow to them. Even if they had the cash on hand to pay it right now, it's probably a hefty sum for such a small developer.

@rebgav said:

@VargasPrime said:

@Humanity said:

$40,000 is a lot of money but that doesn't change the fact that essentially he's saying "I'm not going to take responsibility for my errors because it's going to cost me too much money."

You know, part of the reason MS charges so much money for companies to patch their games is because they test/certify everything that gets put on XBL.

So, by that right, this bug that is now affecting 1% of the people who bought Fez is just as much their responsibility as it is Polytron's. For MS to charge them to now fix a bug that their certification process missed seems just as unfair, if not moreso, than Polytron deciding that they could not afford to pay the cost to recertify.

So, Microsoft should absorb the cost of fixing Polytron's shitty work because they didn't find a seemingly rare bug?

Here's a better idea; Let them patch for free but pull the game from XBLA until it actually works as intended. The game gets fixed, no-one buys it while it's broken, both sides absorb the cost through lost or deferred sales.

"Absorbing" the cost is probably a misnomer. The other part of the reason MS charges that insane amount is as a deterrent from rampant patching. The fact that it's a blanket policy no matter the reason for the patch is the problem, I think.

I see no problem with your suggested idea of pulling the game in order to fix it. But I would be very surprised if MS was flexible enough to allow that. Polytron's choices seem to be: pay to recertify, or leave it as is. They can't afford to do the former, so for now, it gets left alone.

@Humanity said:

$40,000 is a lot of money but that doesn't change the fact that essentially he's saying "I'm not going to take responsibility for my errors because it's going to cost me too much money."

You know, part of the reason MS charges so much money for companies to patch their games is because they test/certify everything that gets put on XBL.

So, by that right, this bug that is now affecting 1% of the people who bought Fez is just as much their responsibility as it is Polytron's. For MS to charge them to now fix a bug that their certification process missed seems just as unfair, if not moreso, than Polytron deciding that they could not afford to pay the cost to recertify.