Fez Developers won’t “Patch the Patch”

A patch was released for indie-dimension shifter Fez last month, and then was promptly removed after certain users discovered their saves became unusable after installation. The patch was promptly removed. Now the same, unaltered patch has been reissued, with the developers, Polytron, giving an explanation on their official site.

"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.

"And because as it turns out, the save file delete bug only happens to less than a percent of players. It’s a shitty numbers game to be playing for sure, but as a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL. especially when you consider the alternative. 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!

"The patch fixes almost everything that’s been wrong with the game since launch. The framerate issues, the loading, the skips, the death loops, everything! All that stuff is fixed! And right now, nobody can get to it since the patch was pulled. For 99% of people, it makes FEZ a better game.

"To the less-than-1% who are getting screwed, we sincerely apologize. We know this hurts you the most, because you’re the ones who put the most times into the game. And this breaks our hearts. We hope you dont think back on your time spent in FEZ as a total waste.

"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."

They went on to thank all fans for the support given. It seems that Polytron almost regrets the game being exclusive to XBLA and it'll certainly send a message out to other indie developers thinking of contacting Microsoft for support. There's also a huge tell in that "only" 1% of users having problems is "good enough," because that's going to be hundreds of people with game-shattering issues. 

It's important to note that both Microsoft and Sony charge for additional patches.