
Microsoft comes under fire for five-figure Xbox 360 “patch fee” - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under-fire-for-five-figure-xbox-360-patch-fee/
======
zdw
They knew what the policies were (one free patch, future ones are $$$) when
they signed up with the platform.

What it comes down to is the developers thinking:

"Who will gamers hate more? MS for the policy, or us for not releasing a
patch?"

Especially if they say:

"We have fixed the problem… MS just wants their ransom for us to give it to
you."

MS is then in the bind of making an exception, thus creating the expectation
for future developers that the platform agreement is flexible and/or a joke.

There's no way to win this one. Both parties have somewhat dumb policies and
because of the contract are deciding to play russian roulette with user's
data.

~~~
reginaldo
IMHO, that "policy" is kind of odd anyway. It creates an incentive for
Microsoft to not do a very through review of the first patch, which is free,
so they can get paid to do a review of the second one.

When coining such things, one must be very aware of the incentives they
create. Bad incentives will accumulate and potentialize and then come to haunt
you...

~~~
MichaelGG
Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft intentionally wants to break games
so they can hope to get patch review fees out of developers?

Edit: According to [1], Fez had 76,000 downloads in the first half-month
(April) alone. And in [2], Fez has 114,000 gamers on its leaderboards. So,
where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just
for a chance to get a $40K fee?

1:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_Arcade_Sales_Analysis_April_2012.php)

2:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_s...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_sales_analysis_June_2012.php)

~~~
marshray
Firstly, I'll say that I've met and worked with several people from Microsoft
and there's no doubt in my mind that they're putting 120% into their QA
mission. I don't think any company in the world invests more into and does
more heavy-duty patch release testing than Microsoft.

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...."

------
ROFISH
As much as I don't like this particular flair of drama, I'm siding with Fish.
If a patch cost five figures just to go through certification, then Microsoft
needs to rethink their XBLA strategy for independent games. Let this be
another flag for teams to avoid XBLA at all costs.

Plus Microsoft's XBLA terms are horrible. For example, you must sign a
contract that puts your XBLA release as a pure-Xbox-exclusive release, or at
least a timed-exclusive if you have the clout to fight back. (Only the majors
can swing a "same-day multi platform release" via XBLA) The percentages XBLA
offers are unfavorable, they make you pay for advertising on the games page,
and I've heard that you make more money via PC release on Steam (or your
favorite DRM-free service). In short: if you're seriously working on XBLA,
demand a better contract or dump it.

It's just unfortunate that Fez's original contract is probably so old, the
Apple App Store with it's free patches was a new concept then. If you're
working on something that will take forever to do, get a PC prototype working
first then dumb down to consoles if you must.

~~~
wreckimnaked
I frankly never understood the real reason why Fez was released exclusively
for xbox. From the outsider perspective it seems like a very bad decision when
it comes to a game as hyped as this one was.

~~~
Steko
MS probably heavily promotes exclusives to their users so free advertising on
what was becoming the dominant console anyway.

~~~
rbanffy
> what was becoming the dominant console anyway

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.

~~~
blindhippo
Console numbers shouldn't be a metric here - I own all three consoles, only
use the Xbox for gaming.

What should be counted is actual money spent inside the platform's online
ecosystem - kinda curious myself how PSN is doing compared to Xbox Live. I'll
have to look this up when I get a chance.

------
christoph
Everything I've seen of Polytron irritates me.

I watched the Indie game documentary a few weeks ago and had a bitter taste in
my mouth from them then.

If you read the press release on their website it certainly doesn't paint a
great picture either.

 _We believe the save file corruption issue mostly happened to players who had
completed, or almost completed the game_

So Phil Fish harps on about how its a game that should be enjoyed on Saturdays
on the couch, but is happy for paying users to have their entire experience
destroyed at the end. As a gamer that would be my worst nightmare and I would
never buy anything you sold again. I would probably put the controller through
the screen as well.

 _The patch fixes almost everything that’s been wrong with the game since
launch. The framerate issues, the loading, the skips, the death loops,
everything! All that stuff is fixed!_

Wow. Version 1 obviously wasn't ready at all. Why was it shipped in the first
place? I guess a good question is why did MS let it ship?

What annoys me more, is in the documentary, the demo build they had at Penny
Arcade had all those seem issues. Phil stood their straight faced telling
people it was because they made last minute changes. This is game that was in
development for FIVE YEARS!

From what I could tell, Phil wasn't even a programmer at all. Just art
director/concept guy. He had some French guy doing all the coding.

 _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_

Then you suck at business. Get out of the game and find something else to do
with your life.

I wanted to like Fez, but Polytron clearly have no idea what they are doing -
how to build a loyal customer base, ship working code, etc. They are happy to
blame the big bad wolf, when quite frankly the only people they have to blame
are themselves.

~~~
michaelt
> Wow. Version 1 obviously wasn't ready at all. Why was it shipped in the
> first place? I guess a good question is why did MS let it ship?

Perhaps the one-free-patch policy should change into a no-free-patches policy,
to encourage companies not to ship unfinished games.

~~~
dt7
Did they have a deadline to release though? Release then patch seems to be the
way to do things now- the last (big) game I remember noticing being delayed
was Halo 2. It seems that since then the priority has been on shipping, then
patching (which creates a whole lot of problems for the future, when MS shut
down the XBL servers and we can't get patches for our older games any more).

------
slavak
Remember back when consoles weren't connected to the internet and there was no
way for developers to push patches to users? Remember how people used to
complain their console games work fine, while their PC games require
installing 3 patches right after installation in order to be able to play the
game?

I'm not saying I approve of what Microsoft is doing here, but surely there
must be a solution _other than_ making all gaming systems equally fucked-up?

~~~
corysama
What everyone is missing over the dim of disapproval is that THE PATCH FEE IS
NOT A PROFIT for Microsoft. They are going to spend on the order of $40K
testing your game. They are that serious about making sure your patch doesn't
screw up the user experience.

~~~
ryanhuff
How much work (number of hours) goes into testing this type of game? Using
$150/hour as a basis, that would cover 266 hours of testing time. As somebody
with no experience in game testing, this sounds more like government pricing
in aerospace.

~~~
wccrawford
Let's go with $15/hr instead, since that's probably what the testers make.
That's about 2666 hours of testing.

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.

~~~
ryanhuff
Is this close to what's actually happening here? I ask because this contrasts
significantly from what happens with Windows Phone app updates, even though
you have similar testing issues (different hardware). What's so special about
the Xbox?

~~~
corysama
It's the Cathedral and the Bazaar again. The reason-for-being of the consoles
is to establish their brands as delivering a /reliably/ high-quality
experience for the users. Users don't worry about variations in hardware,
drivers, install requirements, background processes, etc... They pop the game
in and it works. Even though it's a huge, complicated, AAA game, it's not
going to crash. Can your PC run Crysis? There are a huge number of cross-
cutting issues that can screw that up. Can your Xbox run Crysis? Yes. Yes it
can.

When you submit a game for approval as an Xbox retail game, it goes through a
long, expensive testing process. Any failure means you aren't shipping.
Changing one bit on the disk restarts the testing process. So, you are highly
motivated to test for yourself very, very thoroughly before submitting.

Contrast this with a very open platform like Android where anyone can do
anything with minimal, if any, quality assurance. It's wonderfully liberating.
But, you have to accept the fact that with so many changes from so many people
being mixed together with minimal, if any, comprehensive test coverage, a lot
of stuff is going to be busted a lot of the time.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo spend a huge amount of time, money and effort on
quality assurance for their consoles because if they didn't, you might as well
play games on the PC. They are doing all of this work to establish confidence
in their audience that the $60 they spend isn't going to be buying a game that
crashes on load on 5% of devices.

Meanwhile on mobile, users demand free apps because they never know what they
are going to get. Investing non-zero money to install a mobile app is too much
risk for a user. Lots of apps crash frequently for no obvious reason. Instead
of up-front assurance, the mobile space relies on freemium, reviews, refunds
and other after-the-fact techniques to eventually, statistically, push most
problematic apps into areas of less visibility.

------
kalleboo
At least when patches cost $40k, you have an incentive to make a really,
really solid first release. I wonder if it leads to less buggy software in
general? (obviously this is kind of a counterexample to that...)

~~~
landr0id
> At least when patches cost $40k, you have an incentive to make a really,
> really solid first release.

The rule applies to all titles (not just XBLA -- I remember looking at the
official MS documents stating how much it is), and you'd think that it would
be pretty good incentive, but for some games it's really not. I believe Call
of Duty Black Ops is on its eighth title update. Other games such as Forza and
Halo (which are/were both MS studios) actually have had very, very few
updates. Halo 3 had two total, while Reach I believe had none -- both of which
are very well-coded games.

I think you can generalize and say that it does lead to less buggy software in
general, but it really depends on the studio.

------
duncan_bayne
TL;DR: developer builds software for walled garden ecosystem and is surprised
when he's hurt by the owner of said ecosystem.

<http://xkcd.com/743/>

When will people get sick of variations on this story?

~~~
Steko
When there's not a 1000 bigger success stories that drown this out.

------
briandear
Why would anyone pay someone for the right to only release on their platform?
That seems backwards. The other bit of nonsense is $40,000 -- really? That's
crazy talk. Apple does some boneheaded things but at least you don't have to
pay them for updating and releasing, aside from the nominal yearly $99 fee for
the dev program.

I admit, I don't fully get it. Perhaps someone here can clarify the situation.

~~~
justin66
I haven't seen the $40k figure confirmed by anyone from Microsoft. It's just
being uncritically passed around by bloggers.

~~~
msbarnett
The $40K figure comes from Tim Schafer, who has a history of being a reputable
voice in the game dev community.

There's no real reason to believe he made it up.

~~~
justin66
It's not clear to me that the figure would be the same for every developer and
every circumstance. In any case, I'm sure Tim is a great guy but it would be
nice if someone (anyone who is writing on this) would research it a little for
confirmation.

------
Iaks
Several years ago I was a programmer for a small gaming firm. I spent 3 weeks
working closely with the producer at our publisher and one of the tricks he
told me about in their QA process was they they would hedge their costs by
submitting their games to MS before they had finished internal QA. This would
essentially allow them to obtain free QA time from a very large external
group. (console QA is usually better than PC, so a multi-platform release
would push the xbox version first to maximize the effect.) I think it came up
because the certification fees for releasing on the 360 were just being raised
to free first check, $40,000 each time there-after.

------
unsigner
We've been in the position of Fez's creator, and it pains me to say, we made
the same choice as him (except for the drama) but... the $40k figure is way,
way off. I have no idea how Tim Schafer came to it, or rather, how he was
misinterpreted (because the man is obviously NOT an idiot).

~~~
brohee
Way off is kinda unhelpful, is it way more expensive or way cheaper?

~~~
unsigner
For us it was way cheeper. Still a shocking amount for a small studio. I'm not
aware of any "pricing structure", or if there is any; I heard the number we
were supposed to pay.

------
mtgx
This is why something like OUYA is needed to disrupt the market, and be more
open for developers.

~~~
pjmlp
I wish this was true, but sadly the games developer community is all about
protecting IP and using proprietary tools as much as possible.

Big studios only care about platforms and their support, not if they are open.

~~~
mtgx
Well OUYA is meant more for indie developers than big studios, so that might
help.

------
89a
Can't Polytron use some of their IGF winnings to fund the patch to patch the
bugs they introduced when rushing out their first patch

