Polytron Won't Fix Fez Patch

[DoctorFinger]

It's tough being an indie developer. This is something Polytron has known for a while now, but that fact has been reinforced once again. Earlier this year they released Fez, a really interesting platformer, on XBLA. Soon after they released a patch to clear up some nagging issues, but the patch itself caused save corruption for some gamers. So the patch was pulled and Polytron tried to patch the patch. That was two months ago. That changed yesterday.

We’re bringing the first FEZ patch online.
It’s the same patch.

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.

Polytron says the save corruption "mostly happened to players who had completed, or almost completed the game." They estimate it affected only about 1% of gamers at most, although they also concede that the 1% affected are also among the game's most dedicated fans. But the simple fact is, they can't afford the re-certification costs. EA and Activision may spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on coffee for their devs, but a small studio like Polytron could be sunk by such an expense.

This isn't exactly an uncommon problem. Microsoft will do the certification for the first patch on a given game for free. After that the developer or publisher has to pay for the cert which, as Polytron says, can costs tens of thousands. They also point out that if they were on Steam the game would have been fixed right away, with no extra cost to them. But they're not on Steam. Although they noted in a later Tweet that their XBLA exclusivity expires in a couple months, and a Steam release is likely then.

Source - Polytron Blog