Bad Fez patch on Xbox LIVE, developer blames Microsoft

Polytron re-releases game update that could break your saved game

Tarryn van der BylJuly 19, 2012

We missed this one somehow when it first made headlines a couple of weeks ago – I was probably bunking that day to go shoe-shopping or something (don’t tell James) – but Polytron released an update for their Xbox LIVE Arcade indie hit Fez, then yanked it later when it turned out it was breaking saved games.

Then everybody forgot about it and moved on because complaining about the next Call of Battlefield or whatever was more important at the time.

Now Polytron has re-released the same game-breaking update, claiming that fixing it would be too expensive.

“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,” game designer Phil Fish wrote on the studio’s blog, before launching into a rant about how the system “MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL” even though he must have known this stuff when he originally signed a contract with them, but it doesn’t matter anyway because the issue only affects 1 percent of players (etc.).

“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’.”

So that sucks and everything, but… gosh, it’s so easy to generate a whole lot of instant internet hate just by putting “Microsoft” and “money” in the same complaint, that it really does rather conveniently make everybody forget that Polytron released a bad update in the first place, huh? Huh.

Read more of MyGaming’s coverage of Fez.