

We're not going to patch the patch - cyanbane
http://polytroncorporation.com/were-not-going-to-patch-the-patch

======
shawabawa3
> 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?

~~~
endemic
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.

~~~
BigglesZX
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.

~~~
jpenner
I believe Trapdoor (<http://www.trapdoorinc.com>) funded the rest.

------
justin66
> 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!"

~~~
yen223
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.

~~~
justin66
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.

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

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

That seems like a decent ballpark.

~~~
ars
Missed that somehow. Thanks.

------
CubicleNinjas
• 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...

~~~
cube13
>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.

~~~
jblow
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.

~~~
cube13
Is exclusivity required only for independent developers, or does that also
apply to non-MS published titles?

~~~
jblow
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.

