Warner Suspends Sales Of Batman: Arkham Knight PC

[Simon_Jester]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think 'blockbuster' modern games are getting so expensive to produce that losing your cross-platform sales is likely to really hurt your profit margin. Big companies don't want to be in the position of not only losing their PC sales but taking a dent to their console sales at the same time from gamers who expect to be issued a lemon.

[Mr Bean]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think 'blockbuster' modern games are getting so expensive to produce that losing your cross-platform sales is likely to really hurt your profit margin. Big companies don't want to be in the position of not only losing their PC sales but taking a dent to their console sales at the same time from gamers who expect to be issued a lemon.

The problem is several of the big studios (EA comes to mind) seems to think that if they put a game on the PC it will be pirated to hell and back and they lose all of their sales. There are console dev's who say hey we sold 400k on the PC but our game was downloaded 3 million times from Torrent sites, we'd love to support PC but all our sales get pirated.

One ignoring the 1 lost sale= 1 Pirated game not being true. Two ignoring what successful PC games are (Well supported) and three pretending it's lots more money to develop. It's, with the Xbox 1 and PS4 architecture if you have to put a ballpark on what it costs to produce the game on all three platforms rather than just one (or two) it's pennies on the dollar. If it costs you 500k in manpower dollars to produce a decent PC port and you sell 400k copies on Steam well congrats that's fifteen million in money you left on the table even after Steam takes it's cut (Assuming a 49.99$ game) So if it costs you two million to make a great PC port of a game you've already dumped twenty million into your leaving a bucket of cash on the table assuming you "just" sell 400k copies. Any big name PC game is likely to clear 500k-3 million units easily within the first sixty days with an addition 200k-1.5 mil after a Steam sale or two.

[TheFeniX]

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

Granted, but everyone who knew anything about CM knew it was going to be bad. And hopefully people learned that "review embargoed" games should be avoided as a matter of course. Batman seems to have gone around this by only letting the PS4 version get reviewed.

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.

I have no tears to shed over shit developers not making shit ports.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think 'blockbuster' modern games are getting so expensive to produce that losing your cross-platform sales is likely to really hurt your profit margin. Big companies don't want to be in the position of not only losing their PC sales but taking a dent to their console sales at the same time from gamers who expect to be issued a lemon.

Mr Bean covers most of this, but a lot of the cost of the "blockbuster" game is marketing. Something which is easily spread across multiple platforms, including PC. So it's already an absorbed cost. Engine licensing, I believe, is usually handled either as a flat-cost or based on sales: also absorbed. Voice-actors are another big one: same thing. Lastly (which is sad) is asset development: actually making the fucking game, also absorbed since we're lucky if there is any difference in quality between console and PC versions.

The only real cost is the porting process, which costs nothing compared to actually making the game, and QA/QC..... which no one wastes any real money on anymore either way.

Basically, once you've made a console game, there's no good reason to not release a PC version and make extra money. This is provided your porting team isn't garbage and you don't end up with Arkham Knight PR nightmares. The only reason to avoid PC as a platform is if your developers just can't fucking hack it and/or "release dates," which are the bane of good games.

The piracy angle really doesn't cut it. They usually think of pirates as nerdy young 'murican kids stealing the game as a "fuck you" to the developers. Doesn't really work out that way.

Interestingly, the common belief that it’s mainly hardcore shooter games that get pirated turned out also to be untrue. There’s piracy taking place across the board, it seems, from children’s games through to major commercial titles. These included Fallout: New Vegas, Darksiders, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, NBA 2k11, TRON Evolution, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Starcraft 2, Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2, Two Worlds II, The Sims 3: Late Night.

Just 20 countries or areas from a total of 250 accounted for a staggering three-quarters of total file-sharing activity. The top offenders – relative to population size – were Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Greece, Poland, Italy, Armenia and Serbia. The researchers also note that there are big differences in the levels of piracy for different platforms. Console games are much harder to pirate than PC versions, as the console hardware needs to be modified.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Based off what I've read from people in the video game QA industry, this kind of shit can easily happen because companies tend to test and incredibly limited arrays of hardware. The PC versions of stuff can easily be tested on only one specific set-up, without checking it out at all on different sets of hardware. I can understand why they wouldn't test every card on the market that "should" pass muster, that would get crazy expensive. But when you've got huge titles (like this) it's a good idea to at least test the functionality on Nvidia and Radeon both, as well as AMD CPUs and Intel CPUs.

Alas, the execs don't value QA. I feel bad for the QA teams on buggy releases because odds are damn good that any bug you encounter, they found dozens of times over and submitted repeatedly. And either the devs couldn't find a fix that didn't break things worse, or they weren't given the time to fix it. "Eh, we'll just release a patch."

So yeah, I can easily see how this could happen. I remember reading about the PC port of GTA IV having similar issues. There are so many combinations of components, and so many individual components, that it's inevitable there will be some issues that QA never even sees. Made worse when they all test on identical machines, with no way to test on hardware that's as strong or stronger based off of specs.

Naturally, this all comes down on the people calling the shots. They don't want to spend the money on proper QA, they don't want to say "Shit, this game isn't fit for release yet" and hold off. The latter is understandable, with preorders. Messy situation all around. I'm sure programmers get pretty goddamn pissed when a game has unrealistic deadlines that result in a project they've dumped hundreds of hours into turns out to be shit because there wasn't time to fix major issues.

[bilateralrope]

The latest Jimquisition goes into detail about just how bad things were. A video of Arkham Knight running at 60fps released by nVidia which is rather suspicious. A DRM known for causing performance problems.

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

Granted, but everyone who knew anything about CM knew it was going to be bad. And hopefully people learned that "review embargoed" games should be avoided as a matter of course. Batman seems to have gone around this by only letting the PS4 version get reviewed.

How did people know CM was going to be bad before release ?

People are still willing to preorder from Gearbox after A:CM. They were willing to ignore previous false advertising and put down their money long before we even knew when the review embargo would lift. Long before the game was finished.

Oh, and I view review embargo that expire before launch as a good thing as they allow all reviewers time to do a decent review. Instead of a rush to be the first out, because the first gets all the hits and ad revenue. Embargoes ending when the game launches are questionable. Post-launch embargoes are always bad.

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.

I have no tears to shed over shit developers not making shit ports.

True. If the choice was between a crap port or no port, I'd prefer no port.

[TheFeniX]

How did people know CM was going to be bad before release ?

Namely: SEGA. Going in, this has been a while so I don't know what I recalled before the launch and after, so bear with me: Alien:CM was stuck in Duke Nukem Forever levels of development Hell. And it was passed off to the same guys who fucked Forever up completely. Gearbox is shit and manage to crap out a loot-simulator that managed to not be terrible. That's their one claim to fame and it wasn't enough after their hissy fit when people called DNF out for the garbage it was. While development of CM was going on, Gearbox was working on BL2 in full force. There's no way a team that small could crank out 2 quality games, so they farmed development out to a small developer that hadn't made anything of note aside from Section 8.

Hilarious sidenote: I could have driven 30 minutes and thrown rocks at said developer's office.

We had nothing but promo bullshit about CM and this is almost always a bad thing. Neither Sega nor Gearbox had any idea what was going on with the development. And at this point, SEGA is/was well-known for allowing the release of piles of shit to try and recoupe the cost of, what I assume, is a wicked amount of cocaine they have shipped daily to their offices.

Like I said, I can't recall what came when because the second I heard "SEGA" and "Gearbox" I put the game into "don't even buy if on sale" territory.

People are still willing to preorder from Gearbox after A:CM. They were willing to ignore previous false advertising and put down their money long before we even knew when the review embargo would lift. Long before the game was finished.

If you're still buying from Gearbox after all that bullshit, you really have no one to blame but yourself. Same way I stupidly bought Force Unleashed because I'm a huge whore to the Star Wars establishment. And that game wasn't even terrible, it just wasn't worth $60.

Oh, and I view review embargo that expire before launch as a good thing as they allow all reviewers time to do a decent review. Instead of a rush to be the first out, because the first gets all the hits and ad revenue. Embargoes ending when the game launches are questionable. Post-launch embargoes are always bad.

See, my problem is: I don't care about the review itself as reviewers are generally fucking awful, at least the ones who get all the pre-release shit. They can't be honest or they get fired.

But a review that reads "Our release copy cratered our $50,000,000 test machine because it is an unoptimized and unfinished shit heap" cannot be "rushed out." That is squarely in the "shit the consumer needs to know" territory so they can decide whether or not to cancel the pre-order. And this is another reason pre-orders are choking good games out of existence.

True. If the choice was between a crap port or no port, I'd prefer no port.

I do enjoy hearing console developers/publishers cry about no money in PC gaming when certain developers, who don't suck, can make millions on said system because they understand the PC market differs from consoles.

[TheFeniX]

Supposedly, Warner knew about most of the bugs. Even with a "confidential source," it's hard to not believe most of what's in the article since we've seen it all before and anyone who actually looked at the PC version could not have seen a functioning game.

By Jeffrey Matulef Published 01/07/2015

Batman: Arkham Knight publisher Warner Bros. allegedly knew that Rocksteady's latest superhero opus would be a mess upon its PC launch for months.

That's according to a Kotaku report speaking to numerous sources close to the matter, many of whom were quality assurance testers.

"It's pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state," said one such tester of the PC port that was so bad the publisher pulled it from sale. "It's been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago."

Another tester said "Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months." Yet our tech experts at Digital Foundry described the final PS4 game as a "technical tour de force" and noted in its Face-Off that it was very nearly the same on Xbox One.

According to Kotaku's sources, the PS4 and Xbox One were harder to work with than Rocksteady thought, so of roughly 100 QA testers, only 10 were assigned to report on the PC port.

Another source close to the project said that bug-checking was done at 720p resolutions, so it performed better than when it's played on the higher resolutions most players set it to.

The scope of the game was also an issue and by the time the developer was able to really scrutinise the bugs, it was getting close to launch. "We had some testers bugging more than 100 bugs per day," said one of Kotaku's sources. "Devs would fix what they could but they were juggling that with actually finishing the game so they were insanely slow. Only when the game was done and no new features had to be built could they actually buckle down. Once that happens they also restrict what you can or can't bug, to ensure that they can catch up."

Apparently Warner Bros. decided against using third-party PC testing firms, that specialise in trying out games on a wide variety of rigs, because the publisher was concerned that story details could get leaked. As such, it chose to keep things in house.

This isn't the first time Warner Bros. has shipped a Batman game with a suffering PC port. Batman: Arkham Origins, which was also ported by Divekick developer Iron Galaxy Studios, likewise suffered from a buggy launch.

Last we heard from Warner Bros. on the matter of Arkham Knight's PC port, it noted that the fixes are "significant" and "will take some time".

For more on the PC ports performance, here's Digital Foundry's take on.

We've requested comment from Warner Bros. on this matter, and why Arkham Knight's PC port was launched in the state it was, and will update should we hear back.

No one cares about your story shit getting leaked, we want functioning games.

[Napoleon the Clown]

It's a bullshit handwave, they didn't want to drop the money on more thorough testing. Story leaks tend not to be a huge problem as far as I've noticed. Bugs that make a game literally unplayable are a far bigger issue. But the company doesn't want to put down the money it takes to test a big game properly, or give it a release date that will allow it to come out right.

[TronPaul]

Testing doesn't mean anything if your developers are told to ignore bugs for feature work.

The games industry has had horrible QA standards for years. Every game is a new piece of software and deals heavily with user interactions (rendering, audio, etc). This makes it very unappealing (and difficult) to prioritize automated test suites that run with every build. The fact the game industry treats developers and QA like coal in a machine is another thing that surprises and frustrates me. I would tell anyone with a job as a game developer or tester to find a job in the rest of the software industry. There are plenty of small to medium sized companies that don't treat their employees like crap and give a damn about what they ship to clients.

[biostem]

Pardon my ignorance, but don't game developers have to actually write the game on a PC of some sort, in the first place? Why not create the game with a whole gamut of available settings, on a PC, then lock in whatever settings are best for each console, and export that version of each respective console? You'd then only have to build 1 version of the game, and just hard-code the settings appropriate to the PS4, XBONE, etc, for those ports...

[General Zod]

Because the xbone and ps4 speak different languages, so you have to spend time making sure all the syntaxes make sense or stuff breaks.

[TheFeniX]

Pardon my ignorance, but don't game developers have to actually write the game on a PC of some sort, in the first place? Why not create the game with a whole gamut of available settings, on a PC, then lock in whatever settings are best for each console, and export that version of each respective console? You'd then only have to build 1 version of the game, and just hard-code the settings appropriate to the PS4, XBONE, etc, for those ports...

What Zod said, but also there's just different... everything across different platforms. I'm no programmer either, but coding for the Cell on PS3 was wildly different than for an x86 system. This is why cross-plats tended to run better on 360 even though the PS3 had more horsepower. The 360 was hamstrung early with it's... Xenos? something something GPU. Developers were able to put out great looking games that suffered terrible framerate drops. However, most developers figured this out quickly (from what I can tell) whereas developers for PS3 still struggled with Cell coding. Both new consoles use APUs which, from what I know, require different programming techniques than the standard CPU/GPU combination.

This leaves out that pretty much every console runs it's own Operating System with it's own programming/syntax requirements and developers are provided with their own dev-kits for said systems.

[Borgholio]

Been a few months, but here is a relevant update. Warner has given up on fixing everything that was wrong with the PC version of Arkham Knight and is offering refunds until the end of this year.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/01/warn ... ght-on-pc/

[Joun_Lord]

Wow, thats pretty effect up that the game was so damn bad that its still broken months after being initially released and WB has just thrown in the towel. From what I've heard few if any bugs have been fixed in the re-release and is nigh unplayable on Windows 10.

Thats just sad that a game from a major publisher could be this broken and remain so. Usually games from smaller outfits you hear about the devs stopping fixing the game when its still broken but I've never heard of a major game company doing so (doesn't mean it hasn't happened though, I just might not have heard of it).

The sad thing is when I heard about its rerelease and all the free games they were giving out (I've got like two Arkham games but have yet to play them, thought it might be a good time with the whole series) I was about ready to drop the money to give me something to do until Fallout 4 unlocks as I've yet to get my cryogenic freezing system to work but then heard about the still shitty state of the game and said fuck it. I'll spend my shit on better things like possibly asbestos filled Soviet gas masks.