Sylveria said:
kitsuta said:
Ignoring any arguments about Polytron's past decisions, I'm genuinely wondering what people would think of the company if it shelled out the $40k for a new patch and subsequently went under. Or if it was really unlucky and its new patch made things even worse, and then that had to be pulled. Would people still demand the developer shell out another $40k for another new patch? Is there an upper limit to how much the Polytron should pay to fix this bug?
Why should they get special treatment? If Skyrim had some bug that deleted your save, we wouldn't say "Oh it's okay Bethesda, we don't want to hurt your bottom line. We'll just start over."
If you make and release a game, it better work. If it doesn't work, you better fix it. If you can't or wont fix it, you deserve the consequences. People paid for a product, they expect it to work.Since it's XBLA, they can't even return it or dump it. Welcome to the anti-consumer age of digital distribution folks, you've been clamoring for it, enjoy what you got.
There's a difference between "hurting your bottom line" and "completely dissolving." The consequences are potentially much greater for a studio that can't just absorb the cost of a $40k re-cert. Recognizing that isn't special treatment, it's just understanding that some businesses can afford to make more mistakes than others. You're allowed to let that temper your judgement of a studio's actions without babying it.
The patch was originally released specifically because Polytron wanted to make the game work better for people. It fixed a lot of bugs, at least according to its blog post. That means the company
already shelled out $40k to make the game work better, and then it got unlucky with a bug that only affected 1% of use cases. You can say 'they should have caught it,' but that's demanding absolute perfection of human beings, and even big studios screw up. Repeatedly.
The fact that the studio took responsibility for this decision doesn't mean it can actually afford the extra $40k. It even said that it still owes Microsoft money right now. That doesn't scream financial stability to me, so I'm inclined to believe the decision was more about 'will this patch be beneficial enough to outweigh the costs' than 'how much money can we keep in our McScrooge-like vault.'
That being said, there's a
lot of criticisms to be made of Polytron's previous decisions - its insistence on sticking with XBLA consequences-be-damned is definitely high on the list. It could have absolutely avoided this situation just by being open-minded about a PC release. I would personally attribute its mistakes to naivety, but that doesn't make the mistakes any less boneheaded.