Tim Schafer has hit out against the “layers of bureaucracy” developers have to battle through to release patches and updates for games on consoles.
The lengthy certification processes, which patches must go through before they can be released on consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PS3, are a cause of immense frustration for Double Fine creative director, Tim Schafer.
Speaking in an interview with Gamasutra, the Monkey Island and Psychonauts dev discussed his differing experiences releasing and updating games on consoles versus Steam, citing the huge positives in Valve‘s relatively open service.
“We’re having a blast,” he exclaimed. “I love that direct connection with our players. We can actually put a game on sale if we want to. We can add a patch whenever we feel like it.”
Conversely, Schafer damned the restrictive barriers enforced by console manufacturers, Sony and Microsoft, with regards to patching.
“I mean, oh my God, the fact that I can’t patch Brütal Legend on the PS3, even though it’s a known bug that corrupts your save game, and I want to fix it, and we have the fix. It’s checked in and ready to go, but I can’t patch the PS3 version of the game, because of all the layers of bureaucracy between me and the player. But on Steam we can patch that thing today, you know?”
Schafer hit a similar snag with a texture bug in the Psychonauts re-release on the Xbox 360, which Microsoft weren’t that interested in dealing with.
“I don’t know if they ever fixed that! That’s part of the backwards compatibility wrapper, that was the last bug, and they couldn’t fix it, because they had to go work on… DVD-HD, or whatever.
“That was so important. So they couldn’t fix that bug. And where’s HD-DVD now?”
It’s dead Tim, and has been for a while…
“Yeah, and we’re still talking about Psychonauts.”
Touché. It’s an area in which Microsoft is hoping to improve upon, though, with the upcoming release of Minecraft on the Xbox LIVE Arcade, as it could be the first title on the platform to support more frequent updates.
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If he find it annoying, imagine us the players! It is us that have to wait months for the patches! I can understand that Sony and MS needs to be sure that the patch will work with all firmware versions and hardware iterations, since it is them that receive more slack from the consumers, but they get too long!
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manwithnoname (February 3rd, 2012)