3 ms·

IMHO, that "policy" is kind of odd anyway. It creates an incentive for Microsoft to not do a very through review of the first patch, which is free, so they can

IMHO, that "policy" is kind of odd anyway. It creates an incentive for Microsoft to not do a very through review of the first patch, which is free, so they can get paid to do a review of the second one. When coining such things, one must be very aware of the incentives they create. Bad incentives will accumulate and potentialize and then come to haunt you...

MichaelGG 14y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft intentionally wants to break games so they can hope to get patch review fees out of developers? Edit: According to [1], Fez had 76,000 downloads in the first half-month (April) alone. And in [2], Fez has 114,000 gamers on its leaderboards. So, where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just for a chance to get a $40K fee? 1: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_Arcade_Sales_Analysis_April_2012.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_... 2: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_sales_analysis_June_2012.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_s...
- marshray 14y ago
  Firstly, I'll say that I've met and worked with several people from Microsoft and there's no doubt in my mind that they're putting 120% into their QA mission. I don't think any company in the world invests more into and does more heavy-duty patch release testing than Microsoft. That said, the general question "where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just for a chance to get a $40K fee?" does have an answer. Consider a company where departments are fighting for budgets and managers are looking after their own neck far more than the common good of the organization (believe it or not, this happens sometimes). Organizations can easily devolve into a state of loving those business units that are perceived as "revenue centers" and hating those perceived as "cost centers". Microsoft used to be famous for derisively referring to teams (and even individuals) as "overhead". Obviously it's stupid and short-signted, but sometimes things like QA on patch releases for 3rd-party distributed software end up being several degrees removed from the revenue inflows, at least to the bean counters. In these situations, managers may be pressured into downsizing their quality efforts or trying to raise as much raw revenue as possible even if it really represents negative value on the whole. When the pressure comes down, the perverse incentives pop up. This "stack ranking" scheme sounds like a brilliant example. My guess is this policy comes from one or two^Hthree motivations: * Users don't like patching. * A desire to raise the cost of patching to hopefully encourage higher quality in the 1.0 releases. True or not, the perception among many in the industry is that Apple's app store requirements to jump through hoops to release versions has raised quality among those apps. * But the simplest explanation goes like this: "Why did you have to hire these extra staff at 40K each?" "Well, because we had more patch releases than last year." "Hmm...."
- reginaldo 14y ago
  I'm not saying they want to do that. I said it creates the incentive, not the action per se. Not all facets of a given incentive are acted upon. I even understand the reason for the fee. It's to make sure developers give their maximum before submitting a game so they can avoid the need to patch and the fee in the first time. It creates an incentive for the developers, too... Hell, maybe it even costs more than $40000 for Microsoft to review the patches so they're being benevolent here and the whole thing is moot. I don't know, I don't work there. My post was merely to point that, when one creates an incentive, there might be many sides to it, therefore one must be careful when creating incentives. I'm an XBox owner who buys a lot of games (even arcade ones). I think it's the best Microsoft product I ever use (their awesome keyboards of circa 2001 being a close second). That XBox games on demand thing is just awesome. Will try to be less succinct when commenting in the future.
dspillett 14y ago
> It creates an incentive for Microsoft to not do a very through review of the first patch MS has no incentive to review any patch at all beyond "it won't break stuff other than this developer's stuff". Unless I'm misunderstanding the review process code quality is the developers problem and if they release a bad patch that MS let out because it looked OK form their PoV (it applied cleanly to their test systems, and doesn't make the resulting app break any of the walled garden's rules) then that is not MS's fault. Yes, it is a bad system. But they can't sign up for a bad system, give exclusivity to that bad system, then moan that they are stuck in a bad system and expect me to have sympathy for them. The way to try change the system as a developer is to refuse to take part until it is fixed - if the system loses users due to lack of content then MS may listen. The users are not going to fall for the reverse ransom that they are trying to pull - the average player is going to think "I paid you for the game, you need to fix it for me, I don't care what the costs are to you, that is a business problem for your accountants to sort out".

MichaelGG 14y ago

Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft intentionally wants to break games so they can hope to get patch review fees out of developers? Edit: According to [1], Fez had 76,000 downloads in the first half-month (April) alone. And in [2], Fez has 114,000 gamers on its leaderboards. So, where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just for a chance to get a $40K fee? 1: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_Arcade_Sales_Analysis_April_2012.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_... 2: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_sales_analysis_June_2012.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_s...

marshray 14y ago
Firstly, I'll say that I've met and worked with several people from Microsoft and there's no doubt in my mind that they're putting 120% into their QA mission. I don't think any company in the world invests more into and does more heavy-duty patch release testing than Microsoft. That said, the general question "where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just for a chance to get a $40K fee?" does have an answer. Consider a company where departments are fighting for budgets and managers are looking after their own neck far more than the common good of the organization (believe it or not, this happens sometimes). Organizations can easily devolve into a state of loving those business units that are perceived as "revenue centers" and hating those perceived as "cost centers". Microsoft used to be famous for derisively referring to teams (and even individuals) as "overhead". Obviously it's stupid and short-signted, but sometimes things like QA on patch releases for 3rd-party distributed software end up being several degrees removed from the revenue inflows, at least to the bean counters. In these situations, managers may be pressured into downsizing their quality efforts or trying to raise as much raw revenue as possible even if it really represents negative value on the whole. When the pressure comes down, the perverse incentives pop up. This "stack ranking" scheme sounds like a brilliant example. My guess is this policy comes from one or two^Hthree motivations: * Users don't like patching. * A desire to raise the cost of patching to hopefully encourage higher quality in the 1.0 releases. True or not, the perception among many in the industry is that Apple's app store requirements to jump through hoops to release versions has raised quality among those apps. * But the simplest explanation goes like this: "Why did you have to hire these extra staff at 40K each?" "Well, because we had more patch releases than last year." "Hmm...."
reginaldo 14y ago
I'm not saying they want to do that. I said it creates the incentive, not the action per se. Not all facets of a given incentive are acted upon. I even understand the reason for the fee. It's to make sure developers give their maximum before submitting a game so they can avoid the need to patch and the fee in the first time. It creates an incentive for the developers, too... Hell, maybe it even costs more than $40000 for Microsoft to review the patches so they're being benevolent here and the whole thing is moot. I don't know, I don't work there. My post was merely to point that, when one creates an incentive, there might be many sides to it, therefore one must be careful when creating incentives. I'm an XBox owner who buys a lot of games (even arcade ones). I think it's the best Microsoft product I ever use (their awesome keyboards of circa 2001 being a close second). That XBox games on demand thing is just awesome. Will try to be less succinct when commenting in the future.

dspillett 14y ago

> It creates an incentive for Microsoft to not do a very through review of the first patch MS has no incentive to review any patch at all beyond "it won't break stuff other than this developer's stuff". Unless I'm misunderstanding the review process code quality is the developers problem and if they release a bad patch that MS let out because it looked OK form their PoV (it applied cleanly to their test systems, and doesn't make the resulting app break any of the walled garden's rules) then that is not MS's fault. Yes, it is a bad system. But they can't sign up for a bad system, give exclusivity to that bad system, then moan that they are stuck in a bad system and expect me to have sympathy for them. The way to try change the system as a developer is to refuse to take part until it is fixed - if the system loses users due to lack of content then MS may listen. The users are not going to fall for the reverse ransom that they are trying to pull - the average player is going to think "I paid you for the game, you need to fix it for me, I don't care what the costs are to you, that is a business problem for your accountants to sort out".