Game update log/patch note systems?

[Arcanorum]

I'm working on an online multiplayer game and will make frequent changes, the details of which some players will probably want to check out for themselves.

What standard/widely used methods of handling the distribution of game update notes to players are there, before I possibly go ahead and waste my time creating my own update log tool.

I see some games include a text file with changes when they release updates, others make forum posts. Also, do developers (especially of paid games) have a legal obligation to inform customers of changes, or it is just a courtesy?

[mattstyles]

Pretty sure there is no legal obligation to include change notes although some platforms (such as the App Store) may look more favourably upon you if you do include them, dont think any of them enforce it though and even if they did it would be hard for them to check content so you could blank it if you so chose.

There are a few tools out there that will generate a change log from source control commits but this requires you to be really vigilant with versioning (which you should be anyway) and with your commit messages (which you might well be doing but you'd need a formal commit message style and stick to it for a tool to be useful). They are probably configurable so that they look for a specific format of a commit message (i.e. prefixing the commit with [change], for example) or so that they only look for messages relating to merges but these are all conventions and as each project typically has its own commit message format its hard to generalise a tool to do so (plenty of open source projects do use commit history to generate change logs though).

[bruno_]

When I submit games through the play store I write the features I added in a field that the google developers console provides. It then appears in the play store page of my game.