The final game in the Batman Arkham series had a very disappointing launch this week. Many have criticised the PC port, including myself and thousands of users on Steam. While Rocksteady has offered some questionable advice to PC users, it looks like Warner Bros is now in damage control mode, having suspended sales of Arkham Knight on Steam.
The game won't be back up for sale until it is good and ready, the season pass has also been pulled for the time being. Warner Bros made the announcement a couple of hours ago, saying: “We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards.”
The post even goes as far as to encourage that unsatisfied users apply for a Steam refund, which has likely happened a fair amount already. We don't have any figures on Steam refund rates but I'm sure quite a few people would be interested in seeing those numbers.
There is no timeline on how long it will take to fix Arkham Knight but I imagine Warner Bros is putting a fair amount of resources in to it in order to get it back on sale. Hopefully when the game comes back it will have better graphical options menu, much better optimisation and no 30 frames per second cap.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Obviously Warner Bros did the right thing in this situation by stopping sales of its broken game. However, it would have been better if this whole thing was avoided entirely and the port was made properly in the first place. Will you try Arkham Knight again once it is fixed properly? Or will you be taking your refund and not looking back?
“We take these issues very seriously”
Translation: “We thought we could save a good bit of money by outsourcing the PC version to a small and clearly inexperienced studio. We forgot that the PC gaming market was a big one that actually affected the games industry”
Thank fuck Steam Refund policy came out when it did. With it it’s time to teach these shitty so called Triple-A developers the importance of QA testing and the PC gaming market
Sure, Steam might offer refunds but what about those with physical copies? Not to mention other online sellers without refund policies
that’s been a time old risk with buying physical copies. Unlucky
Warner Bros. and Rocksteady Studios are separate entities.
Warner Bro’s are the publisher. This typically means they are in charge of software engineering as well as handling the funding of the project. In laymans terms: QA and budget
Steam rejected my refund. Apparently it’s perfectly okay to realise a game is so flawed that they aren’t selling it anymore, but not so flawed that they offer a refund to people who managed to go over the 2hour refund limit by a few minutes.
Hardly a surprise from the people that tried to charge for mods.