Fez Developer Refuses to “Patch the Patch”

Polytron has released a statement saying it has no plans to release another patch for its Xbox LIVE Arcade hit, Fez.

Fez has already received one patch, fixing a number of issues. However as a result of that patch a new issue was created, causing a small number of players to suffer corrupted save files.

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.

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.

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.

The full statement can be read on Polyton’s official site here.

It’s very important to note, although Microsoft’s certification process hardly helps small developers, Polytron knew what they were getting into when they signed the deal. It is also not Microsoft’s fault the game shipped with bugs, after all it did have a 5 year development cycle.

The decision from Polytron seems final, so it’s something they and all the players that brought the game, will have to live with.