After a weird fad with checking leaderboards for XBLA games recently (Hexic HD, anyone?) I thought I'd see if I was really the only person on my friends list who played Fez. Game booted, patched downloaded, voilà!

Obviously not the end of the world, I'd already got all the cubes and achievements thus didn't really have much reason to resume my save, but anecdotally I have to wonder how much of a "shitty numbers game" it really is.

After a little more thought on this, I'm curious about the supposed "tens of thousands" that getting a new patch certified would have cost. Recently, for my own amusement, I've been booting up XBLA games that I haven't played for years out just to check the leaderboards. I was surprised by how many of these games required patches, considering I must have downloaded patches for them before. I played a bunch of Castlevania SOTN in 2006 and 2007, and this still required a patch. Shadow Complex took me two months to get all the achievements, and that got patched too. Admittedly these are games with major publishers behind them, but I find it surprising they still had money thrown at them years later in some cases if the cost for certs is as high as Fish would have us believe.

@EvilNiGHTS said:

After a little more thought on this, I'm curious about the supposed "tens of thousands" that getting a new patch certified would have cost. Recently, for my own amusement, I've been booting up XBLA games that I haven't played for years out just to check the leaderboards. I was surprised by how many of these games required patches, considering I must have downloaded patches for them before. I played a bunch of Castlevania SOTN in 2006 and 2007, and this still required a patch. Shadow Complex took me two months to get all the achievements, and that got patched too. Admittedly these are games with major publishers behind them, but I find it surprising they still had money thrown at them years later in some cases if the cost for certs is as high as Fish would have us believe.

Just because you are downloading a patch now, doesn't mean they are patched now. Your xbox only has limited space for holding system required stuff. such as the dashboard, and patches. so when you haven't played a game in a while it will over write an old patch with a patch from a new game that you are playing. then when you, for instance load up Castlevania SOTN it asks you to download the day one patch again.

That's the first time I've heard of patches getting overwritten automatically though. With SOTN there's someone on the Gamefaqs forum talking about the patch as recently as Dec 2010, though that could be the thing you're describing I guess. Would be nice if Microsoft were a little more transparent about the cert process, or we could find a list of title updates online, that way we'd know for sure.