Here http://kotaku.com/5884842/wait-it-costs-40000-to-patch-a-console-game

No wander why certains games get only one patch or none at all.

Wow, that's insane. Thanks for that link, it's an interesting thought.

No suprise.

Imagine how much it would cost to host mods?

And know you know why Bethesda dont release weekly patches

Do we have a rough idea of the sales profits for Skyrim?

And yet the 'Beth don't care about their customers' posts will continue, $160,000 dollars in.

roughly 300-450 million

350mill vs 160k....

Not a MASSIVE outlay...

And how much of that 350 million has gone towards paying staff, covering costs incurred in development, paying distributors and advertisers, paying staff, setting aside for the budget for the next game and -god forbid!- paying staff?

Actual profits will be somewhat lower.

Well, they wasted about eighty thousand on 1.2 and 1.4.

What, you mean Bethesda function like any other business on earth?

350mill is a tidy profit regardless. A couple hundred grand supporting a product that, in truth was largely faulty shouldn't been seen as a good will gesture!

I bet your won't be saying that if it was your money getting eaten into by frequent patches.


Profits from previous games, go towards funding the next....so they would try to aviod spending what they could.

You'd think that'd be a good motivation to make things work the first time eh?

And that's one of the reasons why indie devs are moving away from the consoles.

If it were money that I had even the slightest say in regard to its allocation, doing right by the customers that bought my faulty game would take priority. I don't know or care to what extent Skyrim was "broken" (presumably on the PS3, where I've heard the most fuss coming from), but letting major issues go is unacceptable, regardless of what it costs to patch it. If you can't bring all released versions of your game up to snuff, your next game should be the least of your worries.

Wouldn't need to spend money on patches if the game wasn't bugged in the first place.

And even one million on 100 million would be insignificant (and the overall cost is much lower and the revenue is higher).

Yep, I found about this a few weeks ago when the Dungeon Defenders devs posted about this on their forum because there were so many people complaining about the consoles getting left behind because they had only patched it once.

According to them the first patch is free but the rest of them cost.

If we assume that there's 1,000,000 people interested in the patch, that's a whopping 4 cents each. People don't understand the scale of the business. $40,000 isn't much. $400,000 is starting to bite, but an acceptable loss. It takes $4mil to make one of the major companies to take notice of the charge.

Talk about Microsoft screwing over developers....

That way of thinking will make you popular with player's not investors and owner's hence you would shoot yourself in the foot career wise. The money they earn on Skyrim isn't all used on booze, barbeques and strippers, but it is poured into new projects. This could be expansions, other games they develope or brand new games they plan to develope. And when the cost to launch a patch on console is that much you don't want put out patches that only fixes one thing unless it is absolutely vital that it needs fix ASAP. You want to make sure the patches fixes as much as possible, because doing anything else is really as stupid as it gets. NO matter if you earn 200 million profit you don't want to spend 320K a month on weekly patches if you could have gotten away with 80K for one monthly patch to both xbox and PS3. Doing anything else is simply as [censored] as it gets.

I'm not sure why anyone would be sympathetic: if we pay full price for a game with bugs, how they sort it out is surely their problem to deal with.

That may be true for large companies like Zenimax but what about indie devs?

MIcrosoft and Sony both want to earn money, they are running a businiess and a service. Imagine if it was free, developers could add patches daily basis etc. MS and sony would loose money on that way of doing businiess. Since they need to go through the patch and upload it to their system etc they will charge what they feel is reasonable and some more to make sure developers doesn't overload them with work.

Unless Bethesda is letting these bugs go out, which I'm sure they do hold SOME leniency on bugs to push release, but in general, what bug may appear in one play through to General Public Player 1 may not have occurred during QA Tester Player 2's play through. But I'm not in the business, for all I know, they could just let it all slide unless the public notices it.

I understand that they're running a business, which is why I said major issues. If my game isn't playable by a sizable chunk of gamers on static hardware then it's damage control as much as it is taking responsibility. No one's going to buy my next game if I have a poor track record on their platform of choice. Also, despite being a business, there are times where you should be held accountable for your failings. Just because they don't want to spend money doesn't mean it's excusable not to.