Fez : "Nous n'allons pas patcher le patch"

Vous vous souvenez du patch de Fez retiré trois jours après sa mise en ligne parce qu'il flinguait aléatoirement les sauvegardes ? Polytron annonce qu'il va être à nouveau disponible sur le XBLA. Sans la moindre modification.

La raison est simple : Microsoft demande "des milliers de dollars" pour certifier un nouveau patch (Tim Schafer avait donné le chiffre de 40 000$ il y a quelques mois), une somme plutôt conséquente pour un petit indé. Polytron a donc décidé de remettre en ligne le patch tel quel, estimant que le bug ne touchera pas plus d'un pourcent des joueurs. Et renvoie donc la faute sur l'avide Microsoft. D'un autre coté, on imagine qu'ils étaient au courant avant de signer leur contrat d'exclusivité XBLA...

A propos d'exclu, justement, contrairement à ce qu'on pourrait croire, Microsoft n'aurait pas allongé les billets pour se payer Fez mais c'est Polytron qui doit de l'argent à l'éditeur pour rembourser sa place sur le catalogue, selon les dires du développeur. Phil Fish laisse entendre clairement qu'une version Steam débarquera dès la fin de l'exclusivité, dans quelques mois. Les patchs étant gratuits sur le système de Valve, il n'aura plus aucune excuse.

Update : Polytron ayant supprimé le post sur son site, voici une copie de celui-ci.

We're bringing the first FEZ patch online. It's the same patch.

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. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away too!

We believe the save file corruption issue mostly happened to players who had completed, or almost completed the game. If you hadn't already seen most of what FEZ had to offer, your save file is probably safe. It doesn't happen if you start a new game.

We believe the current patch is safe for an overwhelming majority of players.
The patch fixes almost everything that's been wrong with the game since launch. The framerate issues, the loading, the skips, the death loops, everything! All that stuff is fixed! And right now, nobody can get to it since the patch was pulled. For 99% of people, it makes FEZ a better game.

To the less-than-1% who are getting screwed, we sincerely apologize. We know this hurts you the most, because you're the ones who put the most times into the game. And this breaks our hearts. We hope you dont think back on your time spent in FEZ as a total waste.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".

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. We already owe microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform. People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM.
So we're going to go ahead and put Title Update back online, and for a vast majority of people it's going to make FEZ a better game.

Thank you for your understanding and continuing support.
Sincerely,
The Polytron Tea