Fez

Gimpymoo said:
That was a well formed post and rather informative, thanks.

$10,000 to $40,000 to release a patch just seems obscene.
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It does seem a lot, and I don't remember there ever being an XBLA game that would have cost that much to patch when I was there.. But when you break it down...

I think in 2007 I was getting paid a bit more than £7/hour, call it $10 for lazy maths sake.

$10 x 20 hours (~3 days a bit under) x 30 testers and bang, you're at $6000 in salary alone already, without taking into account any site and equipment costs (lets assume they're absorbed up by MS), which are far from cheap (think of the electric bill of every tester running an Xbox dev kit on top of a PC and monitors/TVs, sometimes a few per tester.)

That's just basic bottom of the rung testers salary as well, team leads and senior testers get a bit more. And once you start getting a game failing compliance and having to be retested... that cost shoots up.

Gimpymoo said:
I can only assume that small devs simply do not bother after the first patch and simply take the money and run, I cannot blame them for that but it all seems counter productive to what MS say they are trying to enforce in which case maybe they should look at changing such policies?

Just seems very unreasonably strong handed.
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In the end, something that may sound simple like testing games, is far from cheap. It's not that Microsoft are onto a great profit earner that they've found.. it just is that expensive to do.

The testing that's done are the kind of thing I would expect to have on a closed unified platform like a console, so I can't say that I think they should change the policies at all, they may seem petty and silly, but they make sense to me.

I think the real question is... Is XBLA a sensible platform for a small indie developer to approach on a limited budget. Did the Fez developers make the wrong call when picking it as a platform? I think everyone is agreed that they'd have been better of going for the PC and Steam in the first place. :(



Anyway, hopefully Rez is coming to PC and Steam, and we can all finally enjoy it. :)
 
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Completed this on XBLA, will happily spend more money and complete it on PC too.

As much as I can appreciate the cost of patching etc, why did Phil Fish (creator) not look into these things before he signed into a MS exclusivity? Comes across as an absolute DICK in his interviews and the Indie Game:The Movie docu.

Fez is awesome though. Buy it.
 
LOL at the predictable reaction in the Steam community:

fezdiscussion.JPG
 
Skyfall said:
Wow, this Phil Fish guy is a complete douche.
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I honestly don't think he is, he comes across that way but my impression is that he's being facetious or sarcastic a lot of the time. Not to say that he doesn't mean what he says though, but when he's having questions and criticisms fired at him all the time, I'm not surprised he responds the way he does.

I think people are just used to never hearing the full truth from the devs and publishers due to fear of discouraging people from buying the end product. Fish evidently doesn't let that bother him; he's his own boss, he's not representing an employer nor does he have contractual obligations to provide positive PR only.
 
MrMoonX said:
Watch indie game the movie, the guy who did Fez spends the whole documentary whining and being miserable
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Skyfall said:
Wow, this Phil Fish guy is a complete douche.
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ive got to agree based on what i saw from indie game movie. probably a little unfair though with how he was left in the schtako by his business partner who worked on the game and then left and called ransom etc.

HOWEVER, i still liked the look of Fez and would still like to play it at some point :cool:
 
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