[Iaks]

Several years ago I was a programmer for a small gaming firm. I spent 3 weeks working closely with the producer at our publisher and one of the tricks he told me about in their QA process was they they would hedge their costs by submitting their games to MS before they had finished internal QA. This would essentially allow them to obtain free QA time from a very large external group. (console QA is usually better than PC, so a multi-platform release would push the xbox version first to maximize the effect.) I think it came up because the certification fees for releasing on the 360 were just being raised to free first check, $40,000 each time there-after.