Tim Schafer is back in the news today with an interesting revelation in a great interview on indie game site Hook Shot Inc that gives some insight into how expensive patching an Xbox game is:

“But the indie community is now moving elsewhere; we’re figuring out how to fund and distribute games ourselves, and we’re getting more control over them. Those systems as great as they are, they’re still closed. You have to jump through a lot of hoops, even for important stuff like patching and supporting your game. Those are things we really want to do, but we can’t do it on these systems. I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch – we can’t afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, that’s where it’s at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. That’s where people are going.”

This is just one number from a single interview - I'm looking for some more confirmation on that figure from other developers, but indications so far is that it sounds fairly accurate. There are a lot of overheads in the patching process and apparently Microsoft deliberately make it an onerous and expensive process to try to ensure that the out-of-the-box experience is as rock-solid as possible.

The figure highlights the cost of doing business on console and goes some way to explaining why post-release DLC on consoles always comes with a price tag. The comparison on PC - where you can get sites like us that will practically beg to let us distribute your patches and updates for free - is pretty striking.