Thursday, July 19, 2012

A Broken System



I, along with the gaming community at large, was shocked by a recent post I saw on The Verge titled "'Fez' developer reposts 'kinda broken' patch with no plans to fix." In this post, it was detailed how the developer of Fez, a highly popular indie game on Xbox Live Arcade, had no plans to fix a bug in the patch of his game. According to the article: 

""We're not going to patch the patch," the developer writes on its official site. "Why not? Because Microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game."
 I am not usually as interested about writing about the business side of games. In fact, I'd rather write more about them as an art form. However, when a game is potentially broken and will stay that way because of silly Microsoft business practices, it seems to be a problem. This is simply a sad state of affairs.
 In an era where developers working on Steam can patch their software with no fuss, having to pay Microsoft hand over fist to make a game work is ridiculous. It's the sort of silly business problem that would only exist in the video game realm. That's too bad, because at the end of the day the people who get hurt are the creators and the consumers. 

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