Comment by fogihujy
4 years ago
> 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.
Undoubtedly a better deal for many, but that doesn't mean the actual costs for a patch for a popular app can't amount to $40k or more.
> 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-...
That just means it wasn't properly tested and that CDPR just said it was. :)
My point is that such debacles are going to be costly, not just for the developer, but for the platform owner as well.
It was properly tested by the platform owners, and it was determined to be in an un-releasable state.
The mistake of the platform owners was to believe CDPR when they said they will have fixed all the found problems by release time.
1 reply →
I'm pretty sure CP2077 was denied several times by Microsoft because there were so many problems.