Payment to BE exclusive? Also $40,000 for a patch?
- Thread starter Squilliam
- Start date
dragonelite
Veteran
Dont know Fez got quite some media exposure over the years that should also be contributed to microsoft or not. Ooh and he said some stuff that made a lot of folks pissed on him.
Good for Polytron for telling the consumers about the situation.
- When Gears dudes wanted to give updates away, MS said 'no can do.. You're on live now, and our internet are to expensive to run to give away for free.' Some gamers said 'great, we'll get full games immediately, thank you Microsoft'..
- When Tim Schafer said he didn't want to pay 40k for updating their game..
Gamers said 'As if Tim Schafer ever made a good game, nobody really liked Monkey Island'...
- Now Polytron says, they're not gonna pay tens of thousands to submit another patch to testing, just to maybe have it pass testing and maybe introduce new bugs needing more patching and another bill in the mail. - Gamers claim that Polytron should make games not needing patches.
No developer, including Polytron, want to ship a broken product with the point of fixing it later, you only get to make first-impressions once, and those are very important in this industry.
Luckily, seemingly Sony has adressed this issue, with Gabe Newell gushing about Portal 2 for PS3 on E3 last year, and how they could update as much as PC there. - And CCP said it even clearer here; Sony didn't just relax the problem requirements for them beeing exclusive, they were working together on the framework, and removed the issue across the entire PSN. Because Sony clearly believed that free to play games with updates, were important for their consolemarket in the future.
I'm thinking that MS is underestimating their competitors, or shooting for third or fourth place. :-/
Sooner or later gamers has to ask why they find it so fun to overpay for everything at Microsoft.
- When Gears dudes wanted to give updates away, MS said 'no can do.. You're on live now, and our internet are to expensive to run to give away for free.' Some gamers said 'great, we'll get full games immediately, thank you Microsoft'..
- When Tim Schafer said he didn't want to pay 40k for updating their game..
Gamers said 'As if Tim Schafer ever made a good game, nobody really liked Monkey Island'...
- Now Polytron says, they're not gonna pay tens of thousands to submit another patch to testing, just to maybe have it pass testing and maybe introduce new bugs needing more patching and another bill in the mail. - Gamers claim that Polytron should make games not needing patches.
No developer, including Polytron, want to ship a broken product with the point of fixing it later, you only get to make first-impressions once, and those are very important in this industry.
Luckily, seemingly Sony has adressed this issue, with Gabe Newell gushing about Portal 2 for PS3 on E3 last year, and how they could update as much as PC there. - And CCP said it even clearer here; Sony didn't just relax the problem requirements for them beeing exclusive, they were working together on the framework, and removed the issue across the entire PSN. Because Sony clearly believed that free to play games with updates, were important for their consolemarket in the future.
I'm thinking that MS is underestimating their competitors, or shooting for third or fourth place. :-/
Sooner or later gamers has to ask why they find it so fun to overpay for everything at Microsoft.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
One way or another you will be footing the bill anyway. MS might charge 40k for updates. Sony might do it for free. But QA will still cost money and somehow it needs to be paid for. That somehow will be you.
Prophecy2k
Veteran
I'm quite sure that the QA cost of certification for MS is nowhere near $40k (I may be wrong). So I think the focus should be setting the cert costs for patches at a reasonable level to merely cover the cost of QA, and not setting them inordinately high so as to punish devs or deter them from releasing games requiring patches in the first place.
What I don't get for MS though is why they need to do any kind of thorough QA? If a dev needs a publisher to have their game on XBLA, then the publisher should be responsible for all rigourous QA, provided the devs themselves don't have the capacity to do it themselves. Platform holders should focus solely on TRCs
There really is so much wrong with this post...
In this case, MS IS the Publisher. Do try to pay attention here.
Prophecy2k
Veteran
Of course I'm aware of that. I'm just extrapolating due to the fact that it seems MS charged ALL devs 40k for patching, rather than just those they publish on XBLA.
MS being the publisher for this developer, they should be doing thorough QA on the back of their "publisher royalty" payment rather than charging a separate fee on top hidden with the "cost of patching".
So that it exactly my point. MS IS the publisher for these guys, yet they charge others (read: devs published by third party pubs) "platform royalties" plus "40k patching costs" (to cover QA). And yet when they publish a game directly for a dev it seems from these comments that they are charging "platform royalties", "publisher royalties" as well as a "40k charge for patches" that should be covered by the "publisher royalties".
That clear enough for you?
Depends on the contract he signed and what goes against his advance, and what his royalties are a portion of i.e. retail or some adjusted figure taking into account overhead.
I've never done an XBLive game, but I've seen some pretty terrible contracts where the developer pretty much pays for everything all of it offset against the advance. I could certainly see the cost of patches beyond the first offsetting against developer advances, and a developer not understanding that cost until later.
Contracts are usually negotiable, but dealing with MS's legal department is IME painful and slow (even in comparison to other legal groups), since your not going to get paid until you have a contract, I could see a lot of developers caving in the process and signing less than ideal contracts, but in the end it's their decision.
The hard part as a developer is you always assume you'll move a lot of copies and will be collecting royalties in no time, in practice developers rarely offset the advance.
I've never done an XBLive game, but I've seen some pretty terrible contracts where the developer pretty much pays for everything all of it offset against the advance. I could certainly see the cost of patches beyond the first offsetting against developer advances, and a developer not understanding that cost until later.
Contracts are usually negotiable, but dealing with MS's legal department is IME painful and slow (even in comparison to other legal groups), since your not going to get paid until you have a contract, I could see a lot of developers caving in the process and signing less than ideal contracts, but in the end it's their decision.
The hard part as a developer is you always assume you'll move a lot of copies and will be collecting royalties in no time, in practice developers rarely offset the advance.
Prophecy2k
Veteran
That's quite worrying ERP.
So you're saying that having MS as your publisher should get you special treatment? Yeah, I'm sure the other publishers would _love_ this.
Put it this way, I'm a MS employee, and when my XBox breaks, I have to call 1-800-MY-XBOX like everyone else, so that no other XBox customer can complain that employees are getting special treatment.
Jonathan Blow weighed in on this a bit (more), came across it in this neogaf thread:
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=485201
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=485201
I don't understand all of his complaints to be honest. Gamers already complain how games are shipped with too many bugs, imagine how many more there would be if there was no certification process! Also he says the iOS experience is better than consoles and I disagree there, the 360's experience is more consistent and uniform than iOS very much due to Microsoft enforcing rules. Finally iOS games frequently crashed back when I had an iOS device and you had to wait patiently for them to be patched. That would never be tolerated on consoles.
Sadly these days it is, because we have no other choice. Games are released with bugs and they don't always get patched. How does Steam fair by comparison? I imagine having as translucent a patching system as possible is beneficial to providing the best experience for your customers, and it'd behoove MS and Sony to encourage free patches. Maybe enforce penalties for broken patches to discourage a barrage of quick and dirty fixes that generate problems? Although then Sony would have to fine itself extensively!
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
I have to say that while I'm not the most accomplished gamer by far, I think I've had only a single game crash on me a single time.
I'm just not experiencing these reports of bugs that other people seem to encounter. Part of that is due to the fact that I've only bought a handful of games on release day, so maybe I'm just benefiting from the patches. But even then, I'm buying these games within a few weeks of their release typically.
So I haven't experienced a rash of buggy games that go unpatched for a significant period of time ??? (360)
I'm just not experiencing these reports of bugs that other people seem to encounter. Part of that is due to the fact that I've only bought a handful of games on release day, so maybe I'm just benefiting from the patches. But even then, I'm buying these games within a few weeks of their release typically.
So I haven't experienced a rash of buggy games that go unpatched for a significant period of time ??? (360)
I don't have an Ipod/Ipad, but I have had several games freeze/force close on Android. It is definitely a pain in the ***.
I actually don't have a lot of issues on my iOS devices at all, certainly not if you take into account that actually multi-tasks, auto-saves stuff to the internal memory, run on various different hardware, etc. On my iPad 3 I can't even remember having had an issue so far at all.