Polytron Refuse to Pay “A Ton of Money” to Patch Fez

Poor old Polytron can’t catch a break. After 5 arduous years in development, FEZ released to critical acclaim, sat at a solid 89 on Metacritic. However the launch wasn’t without it’s hiccups and there were a couple of glitches that hampered the experience. Luckily they patched it! Or not, with the patch causing issues that would result in the deletion of your save game. That patch was eventually pulled down, but yesterday the team announced they would be putting up the old patch regardless of whether it screwed up saves or not.

That sounds pretty dodgy, but they do explain saying:

“Why not? Because Microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.”

This is a very contentious issue with opinions being split down the board. Should they pony up the cash to fix the game for their users? After all they are providing an experience people have to pay for, the experience should have to work. On the other hand, is this just highlighting an issue on Microsoft’s end, demanding large amounts of money that for smaller developers constitutes a serious proportion of their revenue? You would think Microsoft would want that games on their system to work. You can sympathize with Polytron, but they don’t do themselves any huge favors in the way they conveyed the news, appearing slightly butthurt about the whole affair.

Despite previous posts on the site about the patch causing an issue that “seems fairly widespread” and saying they would try to “fix it as soon as possible”, they claim the save bug is affects slightly under 1% and only those who have completed or nearly completed the game (so only you’re more hardcore fans). There’s certainly a case to say this affects a relatively small minority of users, and as the cost would have a significant impact on the developer it would work out best for everyone in the end to keep the broken patch to allow the developer to continue making games.

This isn’t unique to Microsoft either, Sony are equally guilty according to this interview with Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, claiming it costs $40,000 to patch a game! It seems you get one free patch, beyond that you have to pay up or your game stays broken.

Polytron bemoans the fact they didn’t publish through Steam, claiming:

“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!”

It seems that for these independent developers, PC is the platform to aim for with small titles such as Dear Esther recently reporting to have sold over 250,000 copies. Whether this will all change with the arrival of the open android platform Ouya is yet to be seen but with such high barriers to entry and hoops to jump through, will these platforms dissuade developers from working with them? We’ve already heard recently that Limbo could have been a PS3 exclusive, had Sony not insisted that they should own the rights to the property. What do you guys think, should Polytron be obliged to fix their game or does the blame lie with Microsoft and their money grabbing ways?

Source: Polytron