It looks like the bitter relationship between Phil Fish and Microsoft has not been resolved, with Fez 2 skipping both Xbox platforms when it releases. Phil Fish won't say a lot about Fez 2, but he has been pretty clear regarding what platforms the game will show up on. When Polygon asked him this week what platforms he's considering for the sequel, this is what he had to say:
"Not Xbox."
Shortly after the game was released in 2012, developer Polytron pushed a patch out to fix some bugs in the game. The patch, in turn, corrupted some save files. It was pulled by Microsoft, and Fish was faced with paying a second time for certification to fix the patch or just pushing it back up as is, Fish decided to leave it as is, saying that the recertification was too expensive.
"It's a shitty numbers game to be playing for sure," the developer wrote on his blog at the time, "but as a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL." Polytron added that if Fez had been released on Valve's Steam service "the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us." In a follow-up tweet, Polytron wrote "HEY! only a few months left to our XBLA exclusivity!"
On the other hand, Fish seems quite taken with the PlayStation 4.
"PS4 seems to be doing everything right," he wrote, when asked about the console. "It's too early to tell how everything is going to unfold but their heart definitely seems to be in the right place. Which is a weird thing to say when talking about giant monolithic corporation, but there's a handful of people working at Sony today who are really trying to do some good. And whether or not I would develop for it comes down to how the platform holder treats me. With Microsoft they've made it painfully clear they don't want my ilk on their platform. I can't even self-publish there. Whereas on PS4, I can. It's that simple. Microsoft won't let me develop for their console. But Sony will."
