Polytron has elected not to develop another patch for its deubt game Fez after the first was found to corrupt save game data.
Creator Phill Fish explained the situation on the official Polytron blog. Put simply, the costs for releasing a new patch are far too high, stating Microsoft would charge "tens of thousands of dollars." (Right now, patches go for $40.000.)
On the bright side, Fish says the save file corruption is rare: "The save file delete bug only happens to less than a percent of players," said Fish. "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."
This made it "good enough" for Microsoft, but not for Fish, who added: "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."
If you've been holding off on downloading the patch out of fear, there is a possible solution should your data be read as corrupted. Clearing the Xbox 360's cache has been noted to fix the problem in some cases. This does require you to redownload this and every other patch, update, and whatnot the system has received, however. And if that fails, well... yeah.
In other news, Fez's exclusivity on Xbox is almost over. The Polytron Twitter account recently said there are only "a few month left to our XBLA exclusivity." Fish has praised Steam greatly in the past, just recently stating this whole debacle would have been avoided were the game released through Steam. Expect the game to appear there in the near future, perhaps?
Callum Rakestraw, NoobFeed.
never played this...any good? if it goes on steam i would probably check it out.