Microsoft comes under fire for five-figure Xbox 360 “patch fee”

100% test coverage is pure fantasy. You might as ask for a 100% complete specification of a product before you begin working on it.

I'm actually just being devil's advocate here, but most bugs in games are not that important, and the companies that are a little sloppy can spend less money making mostly the same product.

And honestly, I can understand the idea of having the benefit of a couch and huge screen for some very spectacular games. Arcade games, Racing games, fighting games, etc.

But Fez ? Come on.

It could well be an iPad or a PC game it wouldn't really matter.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

That said, the general question "where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just for a chance to get a $40K fee?" does have an answer.

Consider a company where departments are fighting for budgets and managers are looking after their own neck far more than the common good of the organization (believe it or not, this happens sometimes). Organizations can easily devolve into a state of loving those business units that are perceived as "revenue centers" and hating those perceived as "cost centers". Microsoft used to be famous for derisively referring to teams (and even individuals) as "overhead".

Obviously it's stupid and short-signted, but sometimes things like QA on patch releases for 3rd-party distributed software end up being several degrees removed from the revenue inflows, at least to the bean counters. In these situations, managers may be pressured into downsizing their quality efforts or trying to raise as much raw revenue as possible even if it really represents negative value on the whole.

When the pressure comes down, the perverse incentives pop up. This "stack ranking" scheme sounds like a brilliant example.

My guess is this policy comes from one or two^Hthree motivations:

* Users don't like patching.

* A desire to raise the cost of patching to hopefully encourage higher quality in the 1.0 releases. True or not, the perception among many in the industry is that Apple's app store requirements to jump through hoops to release versions has raised quality among those apps.

* But the simplest explanation goes like this: "Why did you have to hire these extra staff at 40K each?" "Well, because we had more patch releases than last year." "Hmm...."

I even understand the reason for the fee. It's to make sure developers give their maximum before submitting a game so they can avoid the need to patch and the fee in the first time. It creates an incentive for the developers, too... Hell, maybe it even costs more than $40000 for Microsoft to review the patches so they're being benevolent here and the whole thing is moot. I don't know, I don't work there.

My post was merely to point that, when one creates an incentive, there might be many sides to it, therefore one must be careful when creating incentives.

I'm an XBox owner who buys a lot of games (even arcade ones). I think it's the best Microsoft product I ever use (their awesome keyboards of circa 2001 being a close second). That XBox games on demand thing is just awesome.

Will try to be less succinct when commenting in the future.

Do you have any numbers to back you up? I couldn't find any. All I got pointed the Wii as worldwide sales leader and 360 and PS3 more or less tied in second place. The 360 seems to have a small lead over the PS3 in the US (with Wii coming in third), but that's all.

Now, how many different XBox 360 models are there? Count each one twice, once for the hard drive and once for a USB Stick that people will use to store the game and saves. http://beta.ivc.no/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_Revisions 8 x 2 = 16.

Now we're down to 166 hours of testing with each revision of the 360.

Let's put 4 people on each one and let them test it for only a week.

And just like that, all that money is used up.

I'm sure some of that money goes into bandwidth, administration, etc etc. So they don't even get 4 people to test it for a week for that money.