We're not going to patch the patch | Hacker News Reader

We're not going to patch the patch

polytroncorporation.com

40 pointscyanbane21 comments

> 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.

Does anyone know any reason why they would do that? Why would you pay to be exclusive to anyone?

Microsoft advertises for you in the form of product placement, co-branding, etc

I don't understand this at all. How did the 4 year development cycle of Fez get funded, if not out of Microsoft's pockets? I don't think Fish & Co. were bootstrapping it. If anyone has insight into Polytron's financial situation, I'd be interested to hear it.

In "Indie Game: The Movie" he mentions that their initial funding came (partly?) from a grant from the Canadian government, to promote creative development etc. What happened after that ran out I don't know.

I believe Trapdoor (http://www.trapdoorinc.com) funded the rest.

> 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”.

To someone with no background on this at all, this is just painful to read. That parenthetical bespeaks a lazy attitude towards engineering. "Why fix it when we might just break it again? It's not like we're actually good enough at this to have confidence in our work!"

Their cost/risk analysis plays out. If the new patch somehow introduced a new bug, it's going to cost them yet another large amount of money to fix it.

And if you say "well just make sure the new patch doesn't break anything, duh!", then you clearly haven't been in software engineering long enough.

I certainly believe it's possible to write and test a patch for a single, well-understood bug and deploy it with a reasonably high degree of confidence that it will not introduce any new issues.

Anyone know how much money he's talking about to certify the new patch? Even a ballpark?

I've heard around $10,000. It's not much if you're a larger studio, but if this patch could potentially introduce more issues, the costs could add up.

> microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.

That seems like a decent ballpark.

Missed that somehow. Thanks.

I've heard it's $40k to submit a patch. I've also heard you get your first patch free.

There's more info in the following thread on neogaf. (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=483071)

Fish has claimed 40,000 in the past. Part of this I suspect is developer time and expensises simply for the cirtifiication not MS fees. For a small company with limited number of employees you cant deligate the certification tasks and result in a delay in developling a new game as people are diverted for the certification process. It is an unfortunate situation but part of the cost and hassle is to punish unfinished games. It hasn't stopped the big game companies from constant day one patches.

• Game company signs deal with Microsoft to be a platform exclusive. • Game company releases game with problems but has a successful launch. • Game company complains that their original contract is bad, it would be fixed in an alternate world, and that they complain about paying to be a platform exclusive.

If I didn't think Phil Fish was a drama queen before...

>they complain about paying to be a platform exclusive.

This smells wrong. There's absolutely no benefit for the developer to release an exclusive game on a platform if the developer is paying the platform holder for the exclusive rights. The only way exclusivity benefits a developer is if the platform holder is paying them to stay exclusive.

It is not exactly that developers are "paying for exclusivity", it's that if they want to be on the platform, exclusivity is required, and fee payments are required. Basically, you have to pay to play. The reason a developer does it is because he hopes to sell enough copies on that platform to make up for the fees.

Is exclusivity required only for independent developers, or does that also apply to non-MS published titles?

It is mainly an Xbox Live Arcade thing. They know they can apply exclusivity pressure to independent developers simply because enough of those developers will cave, since indies aren't generally willing to walk away from the deal.

I suggest you do some math on the actual facts, and try to figure out how much money the developer is actually making on a deal, before you brand someone a drama queen. I guarantee Phil Fish knows a lot more about the facts of the situation than you do.

(And this is not to deny that Phil Fish tends to have a lot of drama. I am just saying that to anyone in the game industry this kind of armchair quarterbacking is obviously uninformed, and then seeing someone attacked / blamed / whatever due to the conclusions of said armchair quarterbacking is just pretty sad. Speaking as someone who has been through this himself on multiple occasions.)

I'm using the content of his post to make a judgement.

He made a bad deal and is blaming others. Had he not blamed Microsoft for the contract he signed I would completely understand his, very tough, decision.

"I guarantee Phil Fish knows a lot more about the facts of the situation than you do."

I should hope so! :)

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