$40.000 per patch? Boo-hoo.
It's math time ladies and gentlemen:
Indie games are priced $1, $3 or $5 each. Let's assume that Microsoft snags half of it (it doesn't, but let's use the big guns). That means that worst-case scenario, you need to sell 80.000 games to get the funds for a patch, best scenario would be 16.000. Let's take the worst-case scenario - the $1 game.
First, let's add development cost, keeping in mind that it's an indie game. Development time would be anywhere between a few months up to a year, so we add a $99 subscription fee to Microsoft's development program, about $40.000 as the development costs and $40.000 as the cost of the first patch. Rounds up to +/- $120.100.
...if you can't even sell 200.000 games then you should probably look for a different occupation because there are 66 million XBox 360'ties out there. That means that there's at least 66 million users, I'm not even mentioning the fact that certain XBox 360'ties are shared so multiple accounts could buy the same game, really.
This basically means that if you can't afford the patch, not even 0,2% of all XBox users around the world didn't give two f*cks about your sh*tty game. They didn't buy it despite the fact it costs $1.
The End.
Okay, I'm sorry, but you're an idiot. Do you really think that most games on the indie marketplace sell even 5000, most of the time?
Okay, let's counter you, because you don't know what the hell you're talking about. "...if you can't even sell 200.000 games then you should
probably look for a different occupation because there are
66 million XBox 360'ties out there."
Are you serious? Unless you mean 200,000, in which case
are you insane? 200. In order to meet that $40k mark, you need to sell 8000 copies of your game. So let's take a look at the actual numbers.
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames
Let's try the very first page. 7 out of 30 on the first page, roughly, sold enough to hit that $40 mark. 1 of those barely sold more than that, meaning they didn't make too much profit if they had to release a patch. The rest of those games have not sold more than 5000 copies. And guess what, these are the best selling indie games from today. These aren't how many people bought them today. That's all time.
So discarding the ones that didn't sell more than 1000, if any of those games had a game-breaking bug, or some type of glitch that needed fixing, they would not have the money to do so. Thus, all of the people who bought those(I don't care how low you think the number is, 1000+ is still a good amount of people) games will not get that patch, in most cases, and are stuck with a possibly not-working game.
Now you could say that they should've caught this bug in testing. Guess what, not all bugs are caught. I mean, just look at games like Fallout, or Call of Duty, or other big titles. Bugs galore. Bugs aren't always in plain sight, nor do they always happen. You obviously aren't a coder if you don't realize this.
The patch is $40 THOUSAND. Now, with the numbers from above, I didn't take into account any additional costs, like Microsoft's fees.
Do remember that indie developers
are not game companies. They do not have the funds that an actual game company would have. They are people like you or me.[b/]
Thank you, and next time use your damn brain.