Surprise Surprise

“What if the game (like Braid was) is designed for a fixed resolution? Running at 1280×720 may cripple sales, so you’ve got to add res switching, then there’s controller support and a myriad of other things (do you go with solely shader 3.x or have a drop down to 2.x, more work…) that whilst not hard to implement add to dev time and costs. Throw in the post release support you’ll likely need to do too and it all starts to add up.”
Right, there are other things, but hardly anything significant. Fixed res? Using an arbitrary resolution adds zero dev time. Perhaps it can be a design question (as with Braid), in which case you output the user’s native res but render within a limited space of the screen, so if you want to force 4:3 use 1200×900 on a 1440×900 display. Simple. Controller support? That uses well-supported APIs provided by MS, no big deal. SM2? I seriously doubt support for that is a lingering question anymore. Post-release support *is* very important for PC games, and possibly time-consuming, that’s definitely true. Most of the time it seems to be related to screwed up graphics drivers, problems that devs can only hack their way around.

But remember the context here. Polytron are in the business of making money, a goal almost certainly aided by a PC port, so their limited-stress console development is just a reprieve. Which is exactly what all the whiners here apparently didn’t understand when they bought T-shirts and such. Never, *ever* support a business, outside of purchasing its products or services out of their own uses. An indie game dev company is no more human than any other. Ultimately if you become a sucker you have nobody to blame but yourself.

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I made no pretensions as to the quality of the shirt. The point is, if the people who bought it just saw it in a store, would they have made the purchase? Problably not:

“ask for support, sell the merch on hype”

“getting people to buy shirts”

Next ask yourself, who the hell would purchase branded merchandise based on something they can’t access? Finally, how many would’ve bought it if Fez was a big-studio game with a multi-million budget?

Nobody bought the shirt for its quality. They got it to, as they naievly believed, keep Fez’ development going.

my favorite part of these comments are from the people who appear to think that they are defending polytron, who name-call like little children, before moving on to elaborate on their own absurd self-importance.

other notable highlights:
lucien’s thoughts on global warming
flamebait’s fatherly economic advice
flack’s preference of computer manufacturer

wah wah wah i wan my bottle

“flack’s preference of computer manufacturer”

I’m just sayin’, you know? I choose to use Mac OS, so there’s no point whining about all the Windows-only software out there. It was my choice. If a bunch of the games you want to play are Xbox exclusives, then buy a frickin’ Xbox already.

Indie developers working on consoles absolutely need support – it is a long, treacherous and EXPENSIVE process and the money doesn’t start rolling in until many months after you finish.

Sweet.

Neat, release date.

Let us know when a port to [anything but 360] gets announced, because I really want to try this…