VargasPrime

@Cirdain: You're right, I could have been more polite. I was responding to the snarky attitude that I interpreted from his original comment. It came off like "I know more than you people, but I'm not actually going to back that up."

@SubTact said:

@MrXBob said:

I love the fact that everyone here seems to be hating on Microsoft as if they're the only people to do this. Sony do it. Nintendo would do it if they allowed as many patches as other systems do.

Fact of the matter is, they cannot let patches fly out for all games whenever the developers decide to do one, for many reasons - the main one being that if something fucks up, it makes the console manufacturer look bad. Patches need testing and certifying, and that costs money to pay people to do.

The Fez patch was tested for what it was made to do - the problem is, nobody seemed to check what happened to older saves, and that is why the corruption error slipped through.

Please, enough of the circle-jerk.

@MrXBob: Thank you for breaking up the near constant stream of ignorance and stupidity in this comment thread. It's as if the CBS Interactive acquisition brought with it a bunch of Two and a Half Men fans, and the lower level Gamespot comment trolls.

People who enjoy games really wouldn't want to live in a world where there were no consequences (to devs and publishers especially) for putting out patches on premium platforms. It definitely hurts the earnest little guys, and that indicates there should be some sort of shift in policy, but to condemn the entire practice is idiotic.

I get not buying into the whole "MS is the evil bad guy here" attitude, but if MS's policy of testing/certifying patches (and charging money to do so) is so fair, shouldn't this save-breaking bug be their responsibility as well? If they test and certify every patch that gets released, aren't they just as responsible when the patch gets released and creates a new bug that Polytron did not anticipate? Is it still fair for them to charge Polytron the normal certification fee for the new patch when this new bug made it past their testing process?

@rebgav said:

I guess Fez didn't sell enough to recoup costs, huh?

I don't think the dev/publisher starts seeing the actual money from XBLA sales for a certain period of time after the game releases. It's possible Polytron hasn't actually earned anything from the sales that Fez has garnered.

I could be wrong, though.

@Cirdain said:

@VargasPrime

@Parsnip said:

So many uninformed comments in here about all of the things.

So educate. Be a part of a discussion instead of just making it sound like you know more than everyone.

Wow jeez, being a little bit of a prick there :) From what I'm reading there is no discussion, there are multiple separate discussions and complaints. It gets a bit difficult when there's a mass of uninformed people like this.

I wasn't really trying to be a prick. His comment didn't contribute anything other than seemingly to indicate that he had some knowledge of the situation that others here don't.

Why post something like that just to let everyone know that you're more informed? Shed some light on the uninitiated instead of just sniping and walking away.

@Parsnip said:

So many uninformed comments in here about all of the things.

So educate. Be a part of a discussion instead of just making it sound like you know more than everyone.

@CosmicQueso said:

@VargasPrime said:

@Gunslinger0130 said:

Last time I checked this was Fish's baby, a piece of art he poured his soul into for years and now he's saying that he's not going to patch it into a solid product because it's too expensive? Fuckin' sellout.

I...

don't think that's what "sellout" means. Not being able to justify spending what he says is "tens of thousands of dollars" to re-certify the game is not something I can really fault him for. They're a small indie developer. They're not Ubisoft or EA. They don't necessarily have a spare $20k to plunk down.

Well he may not be a sellout but he is definitely an inexperienced businessperson. When he signed the deal, he should have considered the costs like these and fully understood what he was signing. It's completely unfair to his customers to shrug his shoulders and say that it isn't his fault he can't support the people that gave him money.

Had he considered these and the other costs, perhaps he would have done something different in his distribution strategy and would have avoided all this mess and supported his customers?

Team Meat managed all this just fine, hundreds of other indie devs have as well, what makes this guy so special that he gets a pass for turning his back on his customers?

I think you're being overly general here. No one is psychic. He was making a game, he wanted that game published, and Microsoft paid to have it exclusive to their platform. Many other companies, much larger and more solvent than Polytron, have taken the same deal. No one anticipates that their game or patch is going to create a save-breaking bug for <1% of their players.

Maybe, once the exclusivity is up, and the game releases on PC and Polytron can bring in more money, they'll be able to afford to pay the certification costs and patch the XBLA version. I think some people are really presumptuous to think that Polytron are just automatically obligated (and financially able) to pay that cost right now.

@Gunslinger0130: I guess I'm not sure how you're getting that impression from what he said. If you read his blog post, he makes it pretty clear that the money is just too much, especially given that they've already released one patch.

If it were a bigger developer/publisher where money was less of an issue, I would possibly share your distaste. But we're talking about a 4-year-old developer consisting of two people. Just because they might HAVE the cash on hand to pay to release the patch doesn't mean that it necessarily makes sense to do it. I trust that Polytron haven't made this decision lightly. The fact that they released the initial patch to fix all the OTHER issues a minority of players were experiencing (and paid the associated costs to do so) shows me that they were committed to trying to make the game as perfect as they could. The fact that they can't afford to patch this unforeseen bug out of the game is just a combination of shitty circumstances: Polytron being a small company, Microsoft's certification policy being overly prohibitive, and a tiny minority of players having crap luck with their saves.

@Gunslinger0130 said:

Last time I checked this was Fish's baby, a piece of art he poured his soul into for years and now he's saying that he's not going to patch it into a solid product because it's too expensive? Fuckin' sellout.

I...

don't think that's what "sellout" means. Not being able to justify spending what he says is "tens of thousands of dollars" to re-certify the game is not something I can really fault him for. They're a small indie developer. They're not Ubisoft or EA. They don't necessarily have a spare $20k to plunk down.

@kpaadet said:

@Corvak: Since like you said nobody releases sales numbers (unless they are really good), nobody can tell if Steam is a better place for indies to sell their games. Super Meatboy is only one developer among many.

Tim Schafers words sounds really hollow to me, when he apparently had no problem giving up the Iron Brigade/Trenched IP in order to be part of the Summer of Acade.

How do you know Schafer "had no problem" giving up the Trenched IP? Just because that's the way it happened doesn't mean his words make any less sense. The fact that they've managed to get Psychonauts, Costume Quest, and Stacking all ported to other platforms, including PC, makes Trenched look like the exception to his rule, which would indicate that maybe that was a last-ditch effort to get it published. Or maybe they needed the money from MS in order to keep making games.

Also, I would take the fact that Steam has grown into such a huge distribution network, with an immense catalog and constant sales, to mean that they're doing pretty well. Sometimes you don't need numbers to know when something is working.

@Corvak: And that's with Steam constantly putting things on sale, plus offering at least a slight discount for pre-orders. I've been increasingly disappointed with XBLA and PSN as distribution services. You would think that seeing the sheer amount of fervor during Steam sale periods would have prompted Microsoft and Sony to adapt their own marketplaces at least a little.