Comment by greggman3
4 years ago
I don't know the specifics of Xbox and patches but I do know that in general, at least in the past, shipping a game on Playstation required thousands of hours of testing by Sony employees. They didn't take your word for it that your app worked. They ran it through a battery of manual testing. Examples, does it recover if someone turns off the power in the middle of saving a game. At that point the save game file may be corrupted. The game better at least boot and let the player start a new game and not just crash.
Other examples include checking all the text meets the platforms spec. It's says "DualShock Controller" not "Joypad". It's always Press ○╳□△ and in the correct color for that button, and responds to the region/system setting. For example that X = select in USA, and ○ = select in Japan
The point being that the game console owners don't just trust that your patch didn't break the rules of their technical requirements checklist. Someone actually has to check and it's not a small amount of work. Maybe $40k is too much but $0 is arguably too little
AFAIK, Apple and Google don't do this much. Certainly not to the same extent as Sony/Nintendo/XBox
What does that have to do with submitting a simple bug fix?
How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?
A simple 30% cut with no other price gouging additional fees was a huge improvement over the status quo.
That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number.
> How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?
Microsoft has to handle patch distribution, patching itself, tech support for patching, complaints and rollbacks and so on for many years after release -- remember, they still provide patches for Xbox 360 games sold in 2005!
If something breaks then I expect the total costs for all that could easily exceed $40k for very popular titles. Just imagine how many installs of FIFA '06 - '19 (the versions available for Xbox 360) there is! This is obviously not the case with an indie platformer purchased by a few thousand players, though, so for smaller businesses $40k would hurt badly, while it's probably a very good bargain for EA and the likes.
Considering the recent backlash regarding Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One/PS4 (not to mention Mass Effect: Andromeda a few years ago), I'd say rigorous testing is warranted. I doubt CP2077 would even have been released for those platforms if they had been properly tested in the first place (not that it would have been an option to not release the game -- It's been pre-orderable for over a year, and the Xbox live store was full of ads for it for many months before the release).
The same logic applies to patches -- if a patch were to actually break a game then it needs to be handled and that isn't necessarily cheap.
>Microsoft has to handle patch distribution, patching itself, tech support for patching, complaints and rollbacks and so on for many years after release -- remember, they still provide patches for Xbox 360 games sold in 2005!
Apple bears all the same costs for iOS and it all comes out of that same 30% fee. For free apps, they eat all those costs.
Hell, Apple provides free in-person customer support as well as support by phone.
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> I doubt CP2077 would even have been released for those platforms if they had been properly tested in the first place
They were, Sony and Microsoft just believed CDPR when they lied about fixing it before release [1]
[1] https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-developer-cdpr-admits-...
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I'm pretty sure CP2077 was denied several times by Microsoft because there were so many problems.
From the platform providers POV it's not "a simple bug fix". It's "schedule hundreds of hours of testing on this new binary blob the developer sent us".
> That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number
Then maybe they shouldn't have shipped buggy software. Go back a few years and they'd have shipped a CD/DVD/ROM and no patching available.