Polytron, the developer of the hit arcade game FEZ has just re-released the troublesome patch which caused some users’ save games to corrupt. Despite wishes to fix this for the fans, the developer said, “We’re not going to patch the patch. Why not? Because microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.”
The team’s letter goes on to express how things would have gone smoother on Steam.
“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!”
And then, as if Polytron had enough of gamers barraging them about exclusivity deals, they went on a tirade about how that came about.
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”.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end, paying such a large sum of money to jump through so many hoops just doesn’t make any sense. We already owe microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform. 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.
You can read the entire letter here. Be warned, as it does have some minor profanity.
It’s commonly known that Microsoft isn’t the easiest to get along with as it doesn’t like free content, charges for updates, and its certification process can be downright frustrating. However, Polytron is the largest game developer in some time that has openly called Microsoft out (other than their competitors), and it’s definitly saying something if a studio which paid for exclusivity rights is having this hard of a time.
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