Indie developer, Polytron, the team behind critically acclaimed XBLA release, Fez, has issued something of a statement on their website regarding a recent patch they deployed to fix a few bugs in their game, but then went on to corrupt save files forcing it to be pulled from Xbox Live. The statement explains that in order to address the issue in the patch and redeploy it, they'd need to pay Microsoft another fee to re-certify the patch, leaving them no choice but to just redeploy the initial patch.

Sound confusing? Well it sort of is, but as Polytron explains, it would cost them "tens of thousands of dollars", and as an indie that "makes no sense at all".

Microsoft gave us a choice: either pay a ton of money to re-certify the game and issue a new patch (which for all we know could introduce new issues, for which we’d need yet another costly patch), or simply put the patch back online. They looked into it, and the issue happens so rarely that they still consider the patch to be “good enough”.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end, paying such a large sum of money to jump through so many hoops just doesn’t make any sense. We already owe microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform. People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM.

Polytron are known as an outspoken developer, but it is pretty frustrating to hear that Microsoft charges anyone for the privilege of releasing game-fixing updates on their service. Especially when Steam does it free.

Click here to read our glowing Fez review.