$40,000 to patch XBLA games

No wonder Uber is staying away from MS. This pretty much kills small dev support. This is from an interview with Tim Schafer.

http://www.hookshotinc.com/interview-schafers-millions/

But there are frustrations, too. Schafer has watched the Xbox Live Arcade and PSN services dwindle away from fantastically promising beginnings to troubled, even fading services. Ever since I played Geometry Wars I thought, what a great new portal, he enthuses.

But it seems that this year, the idea didnt explode like it should have. Back when Castle Crashers came out, it seemed it was going to grow and grow. I just wish there was more support, more marketing, more placement on the dashboard. It could have been our own little Sundance Film festival, a great sandbox for indie development.

But the indie community is now moving elsewhere; were figuring out how to fund and distribute games ourselves, and were getting more control over them. Those systems as great as they are, theyre still closed. You have to jump through a lot of hoops, even for important stuff like patching and supporting your game. Those are things we really want to do, but we cant do it on these systems. I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch we cant afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, thats where its at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. Thats where people are going.

More at the link.

Good read, I'd never thought it cost that much to patch an ARCADE game though.

EDIT:

It never explicitly stated that it was XBLA games that cost $40,000 to patch but rather that the games themselves cost that much to patch.

Tim Schafer is my hero.

that's pathetic.. i'll read the article later, but does it include why on earth it costs $40,000 to update it?

Not surprising in the least.

How much money does uber have left?

We've patched 23 times over the last five months on Steam and it costs us $0.

Does it actually cost 40 grand to patch MNC for the 360?

you could let me buy a hat and get some of that money back

Look at this poor lil guy... He's been looking to buy a hat from you guys for over a year now. :cry:

When you add in test time, fees and the time it takes for a patching process, it can get to $40k. Tim's pretty close.

Oh damn, sorry Timmy, we'll get that item added.

This is why I don't get why people say Steam is greedy.

Sure, they make money but it's a business. What's wrong with them wanting to make money? TF2 doesn't count. They make an incredibly accessible platform for indie games and huge publishers alike.

And then you look at Origin and XBL and they charge top price for digital products and pump out content that was going to be in the original release to begin with and charge a stupid amount for it.

for reals

Steam is greedy (it is a business after all) it is just the lesser of the evils. By comparison it is almost benevolent...

MNC could be free (and not the fake "free to play" that costs a fortune) and I still would never play it on PC. I just don't do multiplayer games on my PC - especially anything that is competetive due to the nature of PCs and how easy it is to hack software. Sure, the 360 can be hacked too but in my experience it is much less prevalent.

And people thought I was just blowing smoke up their asses.

maybe I missed the post where you stated it costed 40,000 to patch it.

we all knew it was difficult to patch them, but regardless of it being 40k or $5 it was the way it was handled that made me and other people angry.

It's a video game. Get over it. Why do you keep dwelling on it?

the same reason you felt the need to come in here and say everyone thought you were blowing smoke up their asses? You misinterpreted my post anyway.

I don't care about the updates and haven't for a long time. All I said is nobody ever exclaimed that it was $40,000 stopping uber, so nobody why would anybody give them the benefit of the doubt. We didn't really believe them because of how poorly the communication was, so as much as you wanted to go around saying it's xbox's fault, we still had no way of knowing and was part of the issue of why people were upset.

You can still think I care and I'm gonna go cry, all I did was provide an explanation.