Warner Suspends Sales Of Batman: Arkham Knight PC

[bilateralrope]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In an absolutely extraordinary move, Warner Bros. have announced they’re to stop selling Batman: Arkham Knight on PC until they’ve fixed the massive technical issues so many are having. Posting to their forum, they stated, “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.”

News that Arkham Knight’s PC port was not good enough came almost as soon as the game unlocked on Steam. Negative reviews poured in as players realised it barely ran, even on top notch systems. After a while, people found workarounds, NVidia card users realised they could switch pretty much everything off and get a playable version, and then the voices of a confused few could be heard saying it worked fine on their system. But still, it was clear the game was not in any fit state to be released.

Rocksteady acknowledged the issues late on the first day, but underplayed them in the usual “some users” way, and then loudly laid the blame at the feet of the hired hands who’d ported the PC version. This all sounds particularly sloppy when you consider how implausible it seems that Warner/Rocksteady didn’t know there were big problems with their PC code. No PC review code was sent out, while console code was with reviewers in time for a day 0 judgement – that’s always mighty suspicious. Further, people quickly realised the game had been locked at 30FPS, in what seemed like a rushed attempt to hide the framerate struggles. It clearly didn’t work.

Now, three days after launch (with all those crucial day one and two sales in their pockets), Warner have announced they’re pulling the game from sale on PC.

“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. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.”

They go on to say they’re monitoring all the feedback on forums, and point out that you can request a Steam refund, before concluding,

“The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played.”

We’ve repeatedly contacted PRs representing Batman: Arkham Knight, and haven’t received so much as a “no comment”. We’ve asked them if they knew about the issues before the game was released, and why it went ahead without any warning, but they haven’t replied.

Which brings us back to that repeated refrain: Never. Pre-order.

Here is the statement from WB

Dear Batman: Arkham Knight PC owners,

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. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.

Thank you to those players who have already given valuable feedback. We are continuously monitoring all threads posted in the Official Batman: Arkham Knight Community and Steam forums, as well as any issues logged with our Customer Support (support.wbgames.com). If you purchased your copy of the game and are not satisfied with your experience, then we ask for your patience while these issues are resolved. If desired, you can request a refund at help.steampowered.com (Steam refund policies can be found here: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds) or the retail location where you purchased the game.

The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played.

A AAA game having problems on release is nothing new. What is new is the game being pulled because of those problems. I think that Steams new refund policy has something to do with this, which is a good thing.

[Zaune]

If they took these issues very seriously they would've held a proper public beta-test and delayed releasing it to the general public until the optimisation issues were thoroughly ironed out.

[GuppyShark]

Holy rusted metal, Batman!

To be a fly on the wall during that meeting....

Giving up all that launch revenue? Amazing.

[Grumman]

Giving up all that launch revenue?

Not really. Between the few days delay and Steam's no longer terrible refund policy, the launch revenue was either already gained or already lost before this announcement.

[GuppyShark]

I expect the majority of consumers are actually not that savvy. How many of us would just assume our PCs are obselete and blame ourselves for the poor performance?

EDIT: As someone who works for a large corporate, I cannot imagine the sort of cojones it would take to actually draw a line in the sand and say, "Our revenue will be zero dollars for this product until such-and-such date."

[Zaune]

I expect the majority of consumers are actually not that savvy. How many of us would just assume our PCs are obselete and blame ourselves for the poor performance?

When the minimum system requirements are a Core i5, 6GB of RAM and either a GeForce GTX 660 or a Radeon HD7950? (Source)

Here, have a Port Report from the usually-reliable TotalBiscuit:



His full hardware specs can be found here, by the way. That rig's about as high-end as high-end gets short of buying commercial-grade 3D rendering hardware.

[Joun_Lord]

Core i5, 6GB of RAM and either a GeForce GTX 660 or a Radeon HD7950?

Christ on a pogo stick, thats just the minimum? Thats probably going to lock out alot of PC gamers just right there. Most people could probably do the minimum but most PC gamers atleast want medium if not high when playing a game.

And I can't see where it needs all that hardware. Looking at the gameplay vids it doesn't look really much prettier then the last gen Arkham games. Is it just badly optimized or something?

[Mr Bean]

An i5 can be had for 150$, a 750Ti can be had for 110$ these days and eight gigs of ram is 100$. It's quite possible to build a PC that meets the Batman minimum specs for 500$

Arkham night had the bad habit of being sold right after Steam refunds were a thing. Except for free copies with video cards it's unknown the percent of games purchased being bought on the PC.

Until we can compare day 1 sales to claimed month one sales (Which WB will never let us do) we will never find out if it was bad like as in 10% were returned or bad like 80% were being returned.

[Joun_Lord]

An i5 can be had for 150$, a 750Ti can be had for 110$ these days and eight gigs of ram is 100$. It's quite possible to build a PC that meets the Batman minimum specs for 500$

Arkham night had the bad habit of being sold right after Steam refunds were a thing. Except for free copies with video cards it's unknown the percent of games purchased being bought on the PC.

Until we can compare day 1 sales to claimed month one sales (Which WB will never let us do) we will never find out if it was bad like as in 10% were returned or bad like 80% were being returned.

Oh I know that man, I literally just bought a pile of parts with similar specs and will turn it on after I find my a nice magnifying glass to fix two fucking bent pins on my CPU socket because intel switched backed to fucking pins just to fuck with people but generally most people still yet don't have that high of system power.

Still a majority of people on Steam, just barely though, have dual cores and about a 3rd have only 1gig vid cards. That locks out half of Steam user just going by CPUs alone.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

[General Zod]

It's not like they actually fixed all the game-breaking bugs in the last Arkham game. I'm not getting my hopes up.

[Vendetta]

If they took these issues very seriously they would've held a proper public beta-test and delayed releasing it to the general public until the optimisation issues were thoroughly ironed out.

To be honest given how badly it worked on literally everything internal testing should have been able to sort this shit out.

Public beta testing is good for balance and server load testing, basic performance shit should be sorted internally.

[TheFeniX]

A game that will run on a PS4 or Xbone is cratering Titans. SLI support is bad enough to be non-existent. "Maybe your PC just sucks."

[Joun_Lord]

The link in the 3rd update of the above link (there is probably a Yo Dawg joke that could be made in that) after probably angering alot of people by saying the recommended is required to get game play comparable to consoles, they mention.......

For users that have an SSD available, we’ve noted increased streaming performance when the game is installed to that type of drive.

Is that implying the game is being streamed like a movie on Netflix or is that just a fancy way of saying loading the game?

But whatever, its pretty shitty that a game would come out this broken. Of course this just seems to be happening more and more lately. Maybe I'm looking at it through nostalgia googles but I don't recall in the olden days games ever being broken this bad, atleast not high budget games. Even games that had bugs that required you to download a dozen patches, like Stalker Shadow of Cherynobyl, tended to be from smaller game companies and still atleast playable despite the numerous crashes (I can look at Beth games the same, though honestly they had their share of crashes playing vanilla but were relatively stable until one starts modding the fuck out of them).

It just seems like with automatic updates on games devs can push out broken messes and just say "we can patch it". They can make money on a game that doesn't work and just fix it later, if at all (I'm sure plenty of us have games that are still broken).

[Vendetta]

A game that will run on a PS4 or Xbone is cratering Titans. SLI support is bad enough to be non-existent. "Maybe your PC just sucks."

With some of the graphical effects missing, don't remember that (PS4 has some rain effects not present on PC).

Is that implying the game is being streamed like a movie on Netflix or is that just a fancy way of saying loading the game?

Large open world games are probably loading something most of the time, but if it's sufficiently constant that drive speed is a factor (the game has to chug a bit whilst it loads in more content in front of the player) then the game is probably keeping a relatively small amount in memory, so the player has to travel less in a given direction to provoke loading.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

The shitty Saint's Row 2 PC port had that problem - the idiots who ported it from consoles seemed to have forgotten that PCs generally have a lot more RAM than a contemporary console, and never used it. Instead, they loaded everything directly off the hard drive, all the time, which of course resulted in constant hitches, stutters, and long freezes throughout the course of normal gameplay, because they bottlenecked the entire game through a system's HDD access speeds.

Because a SSD has virtually instantaneous random access over a mechanically-limited, sequentially-accessed HDD, game performance "magically" improves if you're loading it off a SSD. But that's just because the people who ported the game are idiots.

[TheFeniX]

A game that will run on a PS4 or Xbone is cratering Titans. SLI support is bad enough to be non-existent. "Maybe your PC just sucks."

With some of the graphical effects missing, don't remember that (PS4 has some rain effects not present on PC).

Rain overlays/textures on the characters are gone and I've seen screenshots showing 0 shadows on the PC version. For the developers to fuck the implementation of the Unreal engine up this bad, they really had to work at being terrible.

Is that implying the game is being streamed like a movie on Netflix or is that just a fancy way of saying loading the game?

What Vendetta said, but also notice how "LOADING......." from games like Morrowind and HL2 is basically dead. The Unreal engine (among others) is very good at constantly streaming new assets into your game (sometimes quickly loading low poly/low res ones while higher quality ones spawn) on the fly based on what the game expects you to be doing in the near future. This is in contrast to other games that had to load all the needed assets at one time.

[bilateralrope]

Core i5, 6GB of RAM and either a GeForce GTX 660 or a Radeon HD7950?

Christ on a pogo stick, thats just the minimum? Thats probably going to lock out alot of PC gamers just right there. Most people could probably do the minimum but most PC gamers atleast want medium if not high when playing a game.

And I can't see where it needs all that hardware. Looking at the gameplay vids it doesn't look really much prettier then the last gen Arkham games. Is it just badly optimized or something?

Those are the revised specs. On the Steam store page is an announcement that the system requirements have changed. It is dated 1 day after the game released.

I've also heard that, while the game is capped at 30fps, the in-game benchmarking tool is not. So it will lie to people and return framerates that are not obtainable.

But whatever, its pretty shitty that a game would come out this broken. Of course this just seems to be happening more and more lately.

Yes, it has seemed to be getting worse. What makes Arkham Knight unique is that is looks like this is the first time releasing a game this broken has hurt the people releasing it. The first time AAA developers and publishers have been given an incentive to care.

[Darth Nostril]

Yes, it has seemed to be getting worse. What makes Arkham Knight unique is that is looks like this is the first time releasing a game this broken has hurt the people releasing it. The first time AAA developers and publishers have been given an incentive to care.

Thanks to Steams new refund policy they're actually getting hit in the wallet now and have to pay attention for a change.

Maybe, possibly, hopefully we'll see a bit of a sea change as developers are faced with the reality of having to pay people back instead of shrugging and lying about patching it sometime in the indefinite future.

[Vendetta]

A game that will run on a PS4 or Xbone is cratering Titans. SLI support is bad enough to be non-existent. "Maybe your PC just sucks."

With some of the graphical effects missing, don't remember that (PS4 has some rain effects not present on PC).

Rain overlays/textures on the characters are gone and I've seen screenshots showing 0 shadows on the PC version. For the developers to fuck the implementation of the Unreal engine up this bad, they really had to work at being terrible.

I suspect it's more like the port is fundamentally unfinished but Warner Bros forced it to launch on the same day as the other versions.

[Terralthra]

Is that implying the game is being streamed like a movie on Netflix or is that just a fancy way of saying loading the game?

What Vendetta said, but also notice how "LOADING......." from games like Morrowind and HL2 is basically dead. The Unreal engine (among others) is very good at constantly streaming new assets into your game (sometimes quickly loading low poly/low res ones while higher quality ones spawn) on the fly based on what the game expects you to be doing in the near future. This is in contrast to other games that had to load all the needed assets at one time.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver had that in 1999. I played through the entire game without seeing a loading screen on a PlayStation and Dreamcast, meaning they sideloaded in content for where I was headed off of an optical disk with no perceivable delay. The only cheat Crystal Dynamics had to use was the unskippable 3 second walk-through-portal animation for teleporting across the gameworld, during which the game was presumably loading the area around the portal in the destination. At the time, it was pretty revolutionary. Still is, I guess, given that graphic detail levels haven't that drastically outpaced data throughput in the 15 years since.

[Vendetta]

You'll find if you look at games that don't have regular loading screens as you travel the world that they have a lot of corridors, elevators, staircases, or other relatively constricted area in between larger areas which serve as a way to delay the player and give the game time to load. You don't necessarily notice them if you don't know what you're looking for, but they're there.

A lot of the time in modern games where the character walks slowly with his finger in his ear talking to an NPC on the radio, that's also disguising loading the next area.

Wide open world games, of course, can't use that trick, they have to use others. If you play any Rockstar games you can do tricks to see how little traffic is actually loaded into the world at once (even as simple as looking the other way can reload all the traffic).

[TheFeniX]

I suspect it's more like the port is fundamentally unfinished but Warner Bros forced it to launch on the same day as the other versions.

The much more likely explanation considering their track record:

Batman: Arkham Origins players have suffered from numerous minor bugs since the game's release, but also game breaking bugs, like corrupted save files on Xbox 360, repeated crashes in certain parts of the game, and being locked out of certain missions or other content.

Warner Bros. Games Montreal said that if it decides to release another patch, it will attempt to solve these progression issues, but not other bugs.

"If we do move forward with creating a new patch, it will try to address the progression blocking bugs for players, not the minor glitches that do not prevent one from continuing to play," the post reads. "The issues that are not progression blockers will unfortunately no longer be addressed. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused for some of you, and want to thank you for having been patient."

If. IF they decide to release a patch. I have no idea if they did, I wasn't interested in the whole debacle past that since I passed on the game.

Steam refunds honestly couldn't have come at a better time. Publishers are either going to have to put functioning games over cash-grabs or just abandon the platform (aside from those publishers who can afford to bypass Steam, such as EA having Origin). The Doom and Gloom™ over publishers possibly abandoning the platform is hilarious. "Stop being entitled or you'll get no games!" If I have to chose between not buying a broken PC-port or not having a broken PC-port.... well, it doesn't matter either way, does it?

[bilateralrope]

Steam refunds honestly couldn't have come at a better time.

It's easy to think of better times. Before the launch of AC: Unity. Before Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Basically, it would have been better if we got refunds sooner.

Publishers are either going to have to put functioning games over cash-grabs or just abandon the platform (aside from those publishers who can afford to bypass Steam, such as EA having Origin).

Origin has a great refund policy, and has had it for a while.

As for publishers trying other digital distribution platforms, the best explanation I've seen for Steams refund policy is that the EU forced Valve to implement it. Which means that if another digital distribution platform gets big, I expect the EU to force refunds upon them. Along with the PR shitstorm from people who see a link between Steams refund policy and the publisher leaving Steam*.

The Doom and Gloom™ over publishers possibly abandoning the platform is hilarious. "Stop being entitled or you'll get no games!" If I have to chose between not buying a broken PC-port or not having a broken PC-port.... well, it doesn't matter either way, does it?

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody tries to abandon the PC over this. Thing is, people will see the link between Steams refund policy and them dropping PC*, so that's likely to be a PR shitstorm.

*Even if the link isn't the truth.

[Lord Revan]

Also we should remember that as much as console players "hate" PC users (yes I know it's just a vocal minority), if a publisher were to abanddon PC market in a way that screamed "I'm leaving because steam doesn't allow me to shovel crap without risk of refunds anymore", even if not true and it's just bad timing it would effect sales on the console side too, after all any intelligent console user would ask himself "what if this publisher were to try that with us and not just PC users" and that's ignoring people who like to play some games on consoles and others on PC.

[General Zod]

Because console gamers haven't had to deal with platform exclusive titles forever? Besides, they have a much higher barrier of entry for letting garbage get published. I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal for consoles.