Batman: Arkham Knight Pulled From Steam Until Issues Are Resolved

[lacktheknack]

They will wait and fix them properly instead of releasing early and patching later because they want to start making money.

Two bucks says they stop releasing them at all. PC is the bitchiest of bitches to port to, why would they put in so much effort towards what is easily the finickiest crowd if messing up even slightly just wrecks everything?

I'm not saying that Steam Refunds are bad, just that the diversity of PC gaming may finally be collapsing on itself.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I feel like far too many companies these days see "Early Access" as QA where people will pay them instead of them having to pay actual testers. It's a middle-manager's wet dream. I am truly delighted to see a big company like WB become the first major example of Steam's new refund system being a truly good force for the consumer. All the people who have said that Steam should not give refunds don't have any room to stand on here.

See though, Early Access isn't being used by the AAA publishers (as far as I am aware). Its being abused by low-rent "developers", some of whom are also abusing the Unity asset store to "publish" generic crap and not actually developing anything themselves or if they are, they're putting out crap like Slaughtering Grounds. Sure there are plenty of devs who're doing right by customers in Early Access, KSP and Besiege are two I can name off the top of my head and there are more that are doing it right.
Early Access is also something that customers really need to make an informed decision on, and if they're not researching those not quite fully developed games then its on the customer for buying a product before its finished without looking into said product. I don't condone the practice of half-developing a game and popping it on Steam's Early Access program with no intention of finishing the product or outright reselling a bunch of assets bought from the Unity store and not even developing a single line of code or art of their own, but there's also consumer responsibility to think of.
I was taught at an early age to quality check a product before ever buying it and Early Access is no different than that.
Buying a finished product that isn't actually fully developed though? Thats almost criminal. Like I said, AAA publishers don't do the Early Access thing which I'm glad for, but they also need to make sure if they're going to release a game that it works out of the box and not sending products into the market that are hugely flawed.

 

[subskipper]

I feel like far too many companies these days see "Early Access" as QA where people will pay them instead of them having to pay actual testers. It's a middle-manager's wet dream. I am truly delighted to see a big company like WB become the first major example of Steam's new refund system being a truly good force for the consumer. All the people who have said that Steam should not give refunds don't have any room to stand on here.

See though, Early Access isn't being used by the AAA publishers (as far as I am aware). Its being abused by low-rent "developers", some of whom are also abusing the Unity asset store to "publish" generic crap and not actually developing anything themselves or if they are, they're putting out crap like Slaughtering Grounds. Sure there are plenty of devs who're doing right by customers in Early Access, KSP and Besiege are two I can name off the top of my head and there are more that are doing it right.
Early Access is also something that customers really need to make an informed decision on, and if they're not researching those not quite fully developed games then its on the customer for buying a product before its finished without looking into said product. I don't condone the practice of half-developing a game and popping it on Steam's Early Access program with no intention of finishing the product or outright reselling a bunch of assets bought from the Unity store and not even developing a single line of code or art of their own, but there's also consumer responsibility to think of.
I was taught at an early age to quality check a product before ever buying it and Early Access is no different than that.
Buying a finished product that isn't actually fully developed though? Thats almost criminal. Like I said, AAA publishers don't do the Early Access thing which I'm glad for, but they also need to make sure if they're going to release a game that it works out of the box and not sending products into the market that are hugely flawed.

I think this is pretty spot on. Gamers as consumers have to inform themselves as well as using the new avenues of "voting with their wallets" through Steams refund policy (for example). I never pre-order. Ever. I used to, but got burnt. Obviously I would like to play the latest games as soon as they are out, but it's too risky. I don't want the experience tarnished by fiddling and messing about for hours before I can even play. Patience is key I suppose. There are so many ways of getting the information you need to make a reasonable purchasing decision before getting it. YouTubers, forums, Steam reviews etc, etc.

 

[Sylveria]

Is it hard for people to keep spouting about the superiority of PC when your rig costs $2000+ and half the major game releases still don't run for shit on it? Thank god for Steam having refunds finally, maybe things will start to turn a corner.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

They will wait and fix them properly instead of releasing early and patching later because they want to start making money.

Two bucks says they stop releasing them at all. PC is the bitchiest of bitches to port to, why would they put in so much effort towards what is easily the finickiest crowd if messing up even slightly just wrecks everything?

I'm not saying that Steam Refunds are bad, just that the diversity of PC gaming may finally be collapsing on itself.

If they werent making money why release on PC in the first place? Some games get patched within say 2 weeks....so maybe this will just make them wait 2 weeks to release it. They will never make all PC gamers happy, many will ***** that a gorgeous looking game will look shit. But the Batman game would pause for a milli-second every 20 seconds and thats just unacceptable and obvious and should be fixed before release. I get a developer can find every glitch in a game before release but if its really obvious then thats just laziness and disrespectful to PC gamers. Its why i never buy PC games day one as i hate the whole buy now full price and fix it later attitude. Its something that has moved on to consoles once they could go online.

 

[plus2exp]

Must be the only one, but I've put a solid 2-3hrs into the game and haven't hit any issues so far...
Running it on a GTX970 I installed specifically for the game as well

Same here. I'm also running a GTX 970 and the game runs perfectly fine for me, so long as the nvidia gameworks effects are turned off. When I turn them on it stutters slightly when driving the Batmobile.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

I worry shit like this might give publishers the idea that PC just isn't worth the hassle. Dropping the PC as a platform completely to mitigate the cost of porting from consoles and just focus on the segment that is less of a hassle. One possible downside of the new refund system (which I love btw!).

I agree to a point, but refunds can stop companies releasing crap. On consoles we have had that ability to get refunds on games. All the way back to Atari. Im sure you could get refunds on PC games when you bought them on disc. I think refunds will stop companies porting crap and unfinished games. They will wait and fix them properly instead of releasing early and patching later because they want to start making money.

Yeah, I suppose it all comes down to how big the PC cake is. If it's not too small and not significantly larger than the cost of doing what WB has done now, pull the game and fix it (hopefully) we might see publishers straighten up and focus more on the PC version. Otherwise they might consider the winnings too small to be worth the hassle.

Has to be worth the money to port it in the first place and they do fix games eventually. I know some PC gamers are elitists that want a 10000fps at 40000p but for me the game needs to be playable at launch. The Batman game would freeze every 20 seconds for a milisecond. That is unacceptable and such an obvious glitch that should have been noticed and fixed. They do fix games with patches but maybe now they will patch it and then release it. I think for years PC gamers were treated like crap, regardless of their master race bullshit. Developers released broken games and took their money and gamers had to just suffer with a broken game till it was fixed. Modders became the angels of the PC world and some how developers managed to dodge accountability. Totalwar got away with this for year with modders fixing their games.

As a consumer, we have the right to be refunded for a crap product. We expect it with cars, furniture and food. Not sure why we shouldnt expect it from digital gaming.

 

[rgrekejin]

Must be the only one, but I've put a solid 2-3hrs into the game and haven't hit any issues so far...
Running it on a GTX970 I installed specifically for the game as well

Same here. I'm also running a GTX 970 and the game runs perfectly fine for me, so long as the nvidia gameworks effects are turned off. When I turn them on it stutters slightly when driving the Batmobile.

GTX 970 here as well. I'm having no framerate issues at all, even in the Batmobile, and I'm running it on max settings with all the gameworks stuff turned on except fog. I sometimes get weird graphical artifacts during cutscenes, and there's some texture pop-in, but no framerate issues. I know I'm one of the lucky ones, and I hope this gets resolved for everyone else soon - there's a pretty good game under all the bugs.

 

[LOLITRON]

I worry shit like this might give publishers the idea that PC just isn't worth the hassle. Dropping the PC as a platform completely to mitigate the cost of porting from consoles and just focus on the segment that is less of a hassle. One possible downside of the new refund system (which I love btw!).

I thought about this, but with the refunds companies can literally see how much money they're losing out on. I can't put a number on how much they make from PC sales exactly, but imagine getting all that money and then seeing it all disappear. They know all that money is there and that they can sell their game, but now they see that they'll have to try harder to earn it. WB Studios tried to port a game to PC by spending the least amount of cash possible and now they know that's a terrible business decision. I doubt they'll just ignore PC now.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I think this is pretty spot on. Gamers as consumers have to inform themselves as well as using the new avenues of "voting with their wallets" through Steams refund policy (for example). I never pre-order. Ever. I used to, but got burnt. Obviously I would like to play the latest games as soon as they are out, but it's too risky. I don't want the experience tarnished by fiddling and messing about for hours before I can even play. Patience is key I suppose. There are so many ways of getting the information you need to make a reasonable purchasing decision before getting it. YouTubers, forums, Steam reviews etc, etc.

Generally I won't preorder a game because I'm always in search of the best deal possible. I'm fairly lower middle-class and don't have much, if any, disposable income so I want to ensure that a game is worth buying before I consider putting it in the budget. I do my best to read reviews from trusted sources and try to get opinions from friends who share similar tastes in games.
I personally feel that this instance with Arkham Knight is a product of poor planning for the PC platform, and I've mentioned before that the outsourcing of porting a game to PC was a stupid idea that Rocksteady/WB are now learning. That they pulled it from Steam is a sign IMO that they recognize they messed up and are trying to do damage control. I'm not giving them a free pass on this, but I'm willing to give them time to fix the issue.
Since this is really the first big screwup in Rocksteady's career, I'm also willing to give them some leeway as they've earned a decent chunk of goodwill from me by the first two Batman games. But they've got to prove that they're also willing to fix their screwups and own their poor choices. I don't count Arkham Origins because it was developed by a different studio, and that studio earned a large black mark for releasing such a poor game, especially the PC version which, last time I checked, still suffers from a lot of game breaking or at least immersion breaking bugs that were never fixed. I haven't been back to Origins since I completed it, but I may give it another go because it had a bunch of decent parts to it and the real mess was only during the Killer Croc fight for me, which was sort of fixed by lowering a few graphics settings. However its a testament to poor development when I can't run the game at max specs without graphical stutters or, as was in my case, a total loss of video post-cutscene before the Croc fight.
I may just fire up Origins again today to see if it works any better, maybe since I've done some upgrades since then it might just work better. Might.

 

[JayRPG]

Update: The PC version was pulled from store shelves at every Australian retail outlet this morning.

EB Games, JB HiFi, and other non-specialty stores were informed this morning, with no time-frame or estimation for when they can be sold again.

 

[Las7]

I much prefer I miss out on broken games altogether rather have Studios and Publishers continue to try to milk us while providing second class experience. We need working games, hell if Companies pull out of making money on PC that's fine. As long as the games you buy - are working it's still better. Having your first experience with a new game ruined by some bad decisions or rush jobs.

If all online shops had a very easy refund policy for downright broken games - we would get no broken games. If a game I buy is broken, I don't care if it's fixed in a week - usually for me that whole game is ruined just because of that first impression and winding myself up because of it.

I'm 100% certain that the cost of this Port is comparable to 5% of Batman's marketing budget - 12 people doing a Port and having to fit in NVIDIA Gameworks. Anyone who is not putting the blame on Warner for greenlighting this mess is kidding themselves, especially when they last released a broken Batman game on PC their response was "We are too busy making DLC to fix the PC Version".

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Also question on censorship and I wonder if anyone has touched on this.
Batman is no longer available, and its not even search-able on the store. Burned and salted the ground of all evidence, including the reviews. And at the time they pulled the game, I think there were nearly 3,700 reviews, almost 80% of them negative.
Now when they reupload the game, are those reviews going up too? Will the game start with "Mostly Negative" reviews or will it be an entire clean slate and no Steam store evidence that anything went wrong at all?

It just seems convenient that in pulling the game, "for the fans", that all the negative reviews got trashed too.

 

[RealRT]

And thus begins the next downfall of PC Gaming. Ports are no longer going to be common. Wheeeee.

It's probably just as well that I'm starting to fall out of the gaming scene.

2009 called, it wants its doomsaying back.

The thing is, companies that know what in the fucking world they are doing (read: not WB) can profit off of PC ports easier than ever seeing as consoles are now glorified PCs built on the same architecture and porting is now much easier than, say, porting from PS3 to PC. That and Steam being as big as it is ensures that they will stick by PC. They will have to learn some respect first.

 

[Something Amyss]

And thus begins the next downfall of PC Gaming. Ports are no longer going to be common. Wheeeee.

If the continued existence of PC gaming is contingent upon companies being free to release broken games with no accountability, I'm okay with it dying.

But I don't think those are the options.

Update: The PC version was pulled from store shelves at every Australian retail outlet this morning.

EB Games, JB HiFi, and other non-specialty stores were informed this morning, with no time-frame or estimation for when they can be sold again.

I wonder if this counts as Arkham Knight being banned in Australia.

 

[Ralancian]

Also question on censorship and I wonder if anyone has touched on this.
Batman is no longer available, and its not even search-able on the store. Burned and salted the ground of all evidence, including the reviews. And at the time they pulled the game, I think there were nearly 3,700 reviews, almost 80% of them negative.
Now when they reupload the game, are those reviews going up too? Will the game start with "Mostly Negative" reviews or will it be an entire clean slate and no Steam store evidence that anything went wrong at all?

It just seems convenient that in pulling the game, "for the fans", that all the negative reviews got trashed too.

It's still on the site as searchable. That's probably because it's not for sale so hits the bottom of steams search engine.

I suspect they'll reset the "reviews" in terms of rating once it's re-released but the comments will likely remain. The reviews only because they pertain to this release of the game and hopefully won't be a fair reflection of the re-release. It would be like saying reviews of FF14 count towards FF14: A Realm Reborn.

 

[Buizel91]

And thus begins the next downfall of PC Gaming. Ports are no longer going to be common. Wheeeee.

If the continued existence of PC gaming is contingent upon companies being free to release broken games with no accountability, I'm okay with it dying.

But I don't think those are the options.

Update: The PC version was pulled from store shelves at every Australian retail outlet this morning.

EB Games, JB HiFi, and other non-specialty stores were informed this morning, with no time-frame or estimation for when they can be sold again.

I wonder if this counts as Arkham Knight being banned in Australia.

More likely it's WB asking stores to pull them from the shelves until the game is fixed.

Or it could of infringed on some Australian laws or something, i can bet anything once it's fixed it will be back on the shelf.

 

[rgrekejin]

Also question on censorship and I wonder if anyone has touched on this.
Batman is no longer available, and its not even search-able on the store. Burned and salted the ground of all evidence, including the reviews. And at the time they pulled the game, I think there were nearly 3,700 reviews, almost 80% of them negative.
Now when they reupload the game, are those reviews going up too? Will the game start with "Mostly Negative" reviews or will it be an entire clean slate and no Steam store evidence that anything went wrong at all?

It just seems convenient that in pulling the game, "for the fans", that all the negative reviews got trashed too.

?

It's still showing up for me when I search for it, negative reviews and all.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
So not two weeks after the refund policy is in place, WB is roundly cock-slapped by their own incompetence and their investors who care only about profits.

I really really REALLY hope refunds bankrupt entire developers. Nothing like pure capitalism to determine survival of the fittest, eh?
Make a shit game and you don't survive to make a second.

It's a nice thought, but it's not going to affect the big name publishers, who will continue to rake in a tidy profit from console sales. They're the ones who really deserve to go out of business.

Neat. After all of this time complaining and complaining about games being released in a sorry state, we, as customers, can finally do something about it. Personally, I am having a fairly decent time with Arkham Knight, only experiencing frame drops during Batmobile sequences, but nowhere near bad enough for me to consider a refund. That being said, though, with a big enough game like Arkham Knight effectively being a flop on PC because of refunds, I am certainly scared that developers will be reluctant to make a PC port.

if they consider there port shit enough to see refunds as a threat, Do we want it in the first place?

Hear, hear. I'd rather go back to the days when a lot of high-profile games just weren't released on PC at all than live in a world where they just get barely functional ports shat out by incompetent development teams and people get suckered into paying good money for them.

I agree to a point, but refunds can stop companies releasing crap. On consoles we have had that ability to get refunds on games. All the way back to Atari. Im sure you could get refunds on PC games when you bought them on disc.

Which is ironic, since a refund on a retail copy is an actual loss for the store, because that CD key is not going to work for anyone else. But Steam, which has an infinite supply of copies of every game, took this long to adopt the same policy.

Hmm, I wonder if Steam should start offering the ability to "deactivate" a retail game once it's been returned. Both for the benefit of the store and because the person who bought it probably doesn't want it in their Steam library anymore.

 

[Baresark]

The refund policy was put into place for just this reason. And clearly it's going to work. It's costing WB a whole lot of money. As it turns out, if someone gets a refund for a game, Steam keeps their cut of the sale, so they are literally losing a whole lot of money by releasing a broken game that most find unplayable.