Deep Cuts at Patch, AOL’s Local News Sites

The cuts were an effort to reach profitability in a division that has failed to gain traction with consumers and has suffered huge losses financially. Patch’s troubles have been a source of frustration for AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, who helped found the service in 2007 when he was an executive at Google. Shortly after arriving at AOL in 2009, Mr. Armstrong had the company acquire Patch.

Patch’s idea is to provide an online network of local news sites, filling the gap in coverage left by newspapers that have either closed or greatly scaled back their investment in reporting in response to declines in advertising revenue.

The company said it had analyzed the performance of the approximately 900 Patch sites and identified about 60 percent as high-performing ones that should remain intact. AOL said it would look for partners to operate 20 percent of the sites that are considered viable, and it would close or consolidate the rest. At its current staffing, Patch has more than 1,000 employees.

“Patch’s strategy will be to focus resources against core sites and partner in sites that need additional resources,” AOL said in a statement. “Additionally, there are sites that we will be consolidating or closing.”

The statement added: “Patch has become an important brand across many towns in America. The Patch team across the country has served and will continue to serve communities with journalism and technology platforms. Unfortunately, with these changes we are announcing today, we will be reducing a substantial number of Patch positions.”

Some investors, skeptical that Patch can succeed, have urged AOL to dump the service altogether. The company has told analysts that it expects Patch to be profitable by the fourth quarter of this year.

Mr. Armstrong has said he is confident in Patch’s potential. The company says that the service has 3.5 million newsletter subscribers and 4.7 million registered users, increases of 138 percent and 181 percent in a year-over-year comparison. It says that between April and June, Patch had a 10 percent increase in traffic compared with the same period in 2012.

Patch’s troubles were the backdrop for an embarrassing episode for Mr. Armstrong last week. During a conference call with Patch employees, he became angry with an executive who was videotaping the proceedings and fired him on the spot, as employees listened. He apologized on Tuesday for the manner of the firing.

New Fez Patch Would Cost "a Ton of Money", Broken One Back Online

Fez developer Polytron is re-issuing a patch which, upon its initial release, resulted in corrupted save files for a small amount of players because a new patch would cost the independent studio "a ton of money."

"We’re bringing the first Fez patch online. It’s the same patch. We’re not going to patch the patch," reads a post on Polytron's website.

"Why not? Because Microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game."

Polytron points out that the save file delete bug only happens to very small amount of players; less than one per cent. The developer believes the issue mostly hits players who have completed, or almost completed the game, and reports it doesn’t happen if you start a new game.

"It’s a s**tty numbers game to be playing for sure," concedes the developer, "but as a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL."

"Had Fez been released on Steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away too!"

Polytron believes the current patch is safe for an overwhelming majority of players.

"The patch fixes almost everything that’s been wrong with the game since launch," continues the developer. "The framerate issues, the loading, the skips, the death loops, everything! All that stuff is fixed!  And right now, nobody can get to it since the patch was pulled. For 99% of people, it makes Fez a better game."

Polytron has apologised to players who will be affected.

"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," writes the Polytron team. "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."