Fez 2 not coming to Xbox because 'Microsoft won't let' it
Although Fez debuted on Xbox 360, developer Phil Fish has no plans to bring the recently-announced sequel to Microsoft platforms. When asked which platforms Fez 2 will appear on, he said: "not Xbox."
Although Fez debuted on Xbox 360, developer Phil Fish has no plans to bring the recently-announced sequel to Microsoft platforms. When asked which platforms Fez 2 will appear on, he said: "not Xbox."
Fish has been vocal against Microsoft after the publisher made it difficult (and expensive) to release a crucial patch for his game. On PC, "the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us," Fish explained.
The lack of self-publishing, forced exclusivity (when publishing through Microsoft), and expensive title updates seem to have Fish steering clear of the platform. "With Microsoft they've made it painfully clear they don't want my ilk on their platform," Fish told Polygon. "I can't even self-publish there. Whereas on PS4, I can. It's that simple. Microsoft won't let me develop for their console. But Sony will."
Fish isn't the only high-profile indie developer to debut on Xbox and move onto a rival platform. Braid developer Jon Blow's new game The Witness is a PS4 console exclusive for many of the same reasons.
It's clear that Fez 2 will ship on PC, and it seems incredibly likely that PS4 will host the game as well, with Fish pointing out that "PS4 seems to be doing everything right." He added that "one is having a big love-in orgy and the other is doing yet another f-cking Minecraft port."
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Fez 2 not coming to Xbox because 'Microsoft won't let' it.
Although Fez debuted on Xbox 360, developer Phil Fish has no plans to bring the recently-announced sequel to Microsoft platforms. When asked which platforms Fez 2 will appear on, he said: "not Xbox."-
Right after the huge negative article about Skulls as well. Not a good week to be Microsoft: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/06/20/the-sorry-saga-of-skulls-of-the-shogun-windows-8/
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“I personally would like to go back in time and kick myself in the balls. I’d just like to have that year and a half of my life back.”
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Yea, I'm sure he can get Fez 2 on the Xbox, he's just trying to inflict change in their self-published policy.
I can't say that I'm a big fan of their policy, but at the same time there hasn't been a shortage of games to play on the Xbox 360.
Regardless, I'm never buying a title he publishes on any platform ever.-
But all of those games are on other consoles. I've stopped buying indie games for the x-box because I know they'll end up on Steam where the devs won't have issues with stuff like patches.
Their attitude towards indie devs is also why if I'm going to buy a new console, it's going to be a PS4 over the XB1. -
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Do you also ignore most art, music, movies, and books because of the artist's attitude?
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When has he done that?
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Around about the time Fez came out:
http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/what-happened-to-phil-fish-551386/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/224760/discussions/0/828936719094418300/
https://twitter.com/PHIL_FISH/status/177742654518476802
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/10/fez-creator-gamers-are-the-worst-fing-people/
http://kotaku.com/5891178/when-you-say-japanese-games-just-suck-
All of those are either statements made towards people that were critics of him or were answers to questions on his opinions of certain things. His critics were never planning on buying his games and if you're likely to get upset about an answer to a question, don't ask it.
He's obnoxious but none of those incidents are him being a douche to customers. Even then, I really don't care. He's not hurting anyone with his actions.-
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So steal it. Fez is still a great game, and it's not all because of Phil Fish. Renaud Bedard did the programming and is a super nice guy. He earned my respect and dollars when he patched Fez on the PC 7 times in the span of a fortnight. Disasterpiece did the soundtrack and made the game whole and doesn't deserved to be ignored because of some internet insensitivity.
Phil didn't seem to be going out of his way to be obnoxious, either. It's who he is, and the people who don't like him go out of their way to make it widely known. If they didn't exist I wouldn't even know about any of those comments. Then I would miss the glorious troll on the steam forums you linked. All of those comments weren't directed to you or me, so why take them personally? One of those links you posted even mentioned the apology to the guy about the Japanese games comment, but no one cares.
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Being obnoxious and saying dumb shit is not the same thing as telling customers to fuck off.
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So you only like a handful of bands, directors, and developers?
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i guess that's valid, but i've never felt like i had to approve of a developer's attitude to play their games. jonathan blow is a total pretentious douche but he made an absolutely amazing game. lots of devs are dicks. are they obligated not only to create fantastic products but also be a jolly swell chap on top of that?
shit, all sorts of artists and creators in all media are assholes and produce quality work.-
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Phil Fish is bipolar at best. In the Indie Game documentary he comes across as a mostly sympathetic troubled artist but I'm thinking in real life the deal is that he's basically somewhat nutty and the Internet has siezed on the times when he's gone off his meds. He also never apologizes.
He's basically Derek Smart back when Derek Smart was incoherent and had only delivered one game.
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I think generally people on the Internet think you're a douche if you disagree with them.
Because they're idiots
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Fez was made by Phil Fish (he of the PCs are for spreadsheets quote, among others). Jonathon Blow made Braid and is working on The Witness, which is not coming to XbOne.
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Seriously. I'd rather have more game developers like Jonathan Blow than CliffyB.
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It's true for all intents and purposes; MS is particularly hostile to indies. Barring giving up a publisher's cut for no reason, he has no path. http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/xbox-one-vs.-indies-microsoft-bullies-developers-into-signing-with-publishe
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What purpose do publishers serve in a digital delivery era if you can fund development without them? For all the hype MS placed on online purchase and cloud service, it seems strange they would insist on keeping publishers around.
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Promotion and seed funding. That's all that is left to them. Some of the larger ones have other resources they can offer (like EA offering access to Frostbyte 2/ DICE resources). Also a corporate Unreal license.
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I think it's time for people to just stop feeding MS this criticism. At best it's used by MS to craft a fake mea culpa. Vote with your wallet.
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It is easy to hate both equally.
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that's pretty much what he's saying.
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Not quite true: http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/xbox-one-vs.-indies-microsoft-bullies-developers-into-signing-with-publishe
"To explain why, I caught up with Brian Provinciano, who released the game Retro City Rampage on damned near every service and console there is. He gave an illuminating talk about what he learned from the experience, and he’s become an outspoken critic of Microsoft’s policies.
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“Like any publisher, Microsoft Studios takes more from you than a simple platform revshare,” he said. “In addition to their publisher cut, Microsoft Studios also requires at minimum a timed exclusivity, so you won't be able to release on other platforms day one.”
So you end up with less of the revenue for yourself, Microsoft gets a cut as the publisher and the platform holder, and you have to be exclusive to the platform for a set amount of time. Or you can go through a third-party publisher, since Microsoft will only allow companies that release retail games to have slots on Xbox Live.
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But you can go with a third-party publisher for your Xbox Live release if you want to avoid being forced into timed exclusivity. Here’s the catch: Most publishers can’t, or won’t, sign a deal to publish just on Xbox Live. They want a cut of everything your game sells, on every platform.
“They feel that if they're publishing your game, they want to be the end-all-be-all publisher,” Provinciano said. “They want to publish all platforms, even those which you could self-publish on.”"
That's why.
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Take a look at the replies below yours. He's being smart, as are most other indies, to avoid MS right now. If you want more, you can read up on it on RPS. They have an article with other indies talking about how unfriendly MS's been.
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He doesn't want to sign with a publisher he doesn't need just to release on a platform that's going to be openly hostile to him supporting his game after it's released. Sounds to me like he's making the only responsible decision MS is allowing.
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That sucks.
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Only retail publishers may have XBLA slots; that's DUM. How does that do anything to promote an online ecosystem? This, and charging a five-figure sum for one title update (which is why Fez didn't get a second XBLA patch... http://www.shacknews.com/article/74881/fez-re-releasing-buggy-patch-due-to-cert-costs ..., and Silent Hill HD Collection had its patch canned: http://www.shacknews.com/article/75198/silent-hill-hd-collection-xbox-360-patch-scrapped ).
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yeah why dont they let anybody publish whatever the hell they want and not bother with any qa
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I want this game on my Vita!!!
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Microsoft probably didn't suck his dick hard enough. Poor Fish. :(
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I wish the press would stop feeding this guy's narcissism, but I know he is too quotable an asshole not too. I might buy and play a game of his if he ever grows up; not holding out hope though.
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I can't think of a game that hasn't needed patches. You're arguing for a system that doesn't work.
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The way that most games release these days (i.e.: grind to hit the cert date), there's bound to be problems that have to go into the first patch, so it's sort of equivalent to the old days of "get it right the first time". After that, you have to pay a huge fee for a patch, and most indie devs can't afford it.
As it is, most games right now don't get ENOUGH patches, because the devs are too busy working on DLC or the next game, and because of the expense of cert (especially 360 cert).-
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Too late; they already are.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/76334/medal-of-warfighter-day-1-patch-is-massive
http://www.shacknews.com/article/73195/skyrim-15-patch-hit-xbox-live-ps3-today
http://www.shacknews.com/article/73233/mass-effect-3-face-bug-patch-hits-today
http://www.shacknews.com/article/77812/aliens-colonial-marines-launch-day-patches-detailed
http://www.shacknews.com/article/79740/the-last-of-us-patch-causes-save-issues
http://www.shacknews.com/article/74726/day-z-172-patch-may-cause-equipment-loss
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Publishers not only take a huge cut, but sometimes want IP rights or platform limitations (especially Microsoft Studios). The whole idea of publishing online is to not have to deal with disc production, and to make updates easily and automatically distributed.
There's also a large spectrum of functionality that's broken with a bug, far more than just "everything's perfect" or "it's on fire!". Fez's proposed 2nd patch was to fix a bug that affected 1% of users, but instead... "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." http://www.shacknews.com/article/74881/fez-re-releasing-buggy-patch-due-to-cert-costs
Fez on Steam is currently on 1.07. They're delivering continued bug fixes to their users. http://steamcommunity.com/app/224760/discussions/0/864970668183104750/
Console cert is to ensure that crap isn't released on a platform, tarnishing its reputation. It isn't QA. It also shouldn't be used to place developers into a situation where they would have to bankrupt themselves to patch their game.
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What's your deal? A one-to-two man team isn't going to catch all of the edge cases in a reasonably sized indie game. And what if they just want to add features?
Have you ever written/shipped software or are you just talking out of your ass? Apple lets developers ship all the patches they want -- does that seem to be a bad thing or a successful thing to you?-
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Clearly the best solution then is to arbitrarily create a scenario that encourages not fixing a broken game once it's been released.
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Ok, so buggy apps reflect poorly on the platform. Why then would you arbitrarily create a scenario that encourages developers not to fix games that turn out to have bugs?
Guess what? Bugs happen regardless of how much QA you do. Making it prohibitive to fix those bugs is flat-out stupid. Especially when this restriction doesn't actually impact anyone except indies. Big publishers have far more than enough cash to just pay the patch fee without even thinking about it. This hurts the little guy and the consumer and doesn't effectively reduce the number of bugs you see or the number of patches you get on large games anyway.
All it does is make it more likely that the indie game you bought that turned out to have a bug that slipped through QA won't get fixed. Sounds like a fucking marvelous plan there.-
Thought my previous post had been lost, hence the double-post.
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Yes, people don't mind paying lower prices for great games that may still need some tweaking. You've cited plenty of wildly successful platforms in this very thread as examples of this.
Have you ever played Kerbal Space Program? That game is at time hilariously broken, and it's also one of the best things in the world. I've gotten the $20 I spent on it back in enjoyment several times over, and it's still very much in active development.
It's great that there are platforms for projects like that, and I am happy to support them. If MS doesn't want to open the door to that, then fine, but I think they're missing out.-
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That's your personal preference and you're certainly entitled to it. If you're buying $60 disc versions of games you should have the expectation that they should 100% work all the time. That's not the only model that works though. But again if MS wants to shut out that segment then more (or less) power to them.
Don't worry about missing those piddly "minor" games. They're buggy pieces of crap you don't want to waste you time with. -
Except you still do have to worry that shit isn't going to work because shit breaks and needs to get patched all the time regardless of these restrictions.
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You seem to vastly overestimate the abilities of QA. Even massive outsourced publisher QA departments don't find every bug, because it's a team of (At most) a couple of hundred versus several hundreds of thousands people playing it once the game is released.
Things slip through. Restricting patches will only mean that once these problems ARE found, that the developers will have their hands tied to do anything about it.
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Indeed. MS is free to be hostile to developers all they want but when indie titles stop appearing on xbox in favor of everything else, people shouldn't act all surprised or call those developers names. Microsoft is basically saying they don't want indies on their platform and everyone else is welcoming them with open arms.
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I'm not requiring any particular number of minutes, here, Haxim, I'm just wondering if people are projecting their dislike of the game onto its author or if people who don't care about Fez are just mad because of what he said about PCs. I think Fez is a fantastic, delightful game. It might be the first new game I've completed in 2013. I don't really care who made it or what they have to say. Artists are crazy. It's part of what makes them artists.
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I had never actually heard him talk and then he was on Unprofessional Fridays and I sorta expected to hate him or something but he came across as just an intelligent guy. I guess he can talk out of his ass sometimes but he seemed like someone worth paying attention to even if you have to filter out bullshit occasionally.
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Yeah whenever i've seen him on GB he seemed like a regular funny nice guy.
Jesus nerds like to get their panties in a twist about this kind of shit.
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Having read only a few of his quotes, plus from what I saw on Indie Game: The Movie, Fish comes across as a big ole bag-o-dicks. That said, I fucking loved FEZ. A bit buggy in places, but an amazing game with great controls, amazing worlds, and a stellar soundtrack. I'm looking forward to what Polygon will create with FEZ 2.
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