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Batman: Arkham Knight for PC sales suspended

by Mark Tyson on 25 June 2015, 10:05

Tags: Warner Bros. (NYSE:TWX)

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Batman: Arkham Night PC has been removed from sale while the developer works on ironing out serious wrinkles in the game's performance. This move has come just hours after officially issuing details of recommended hardware specs and their associated recommended graphical settings which was intended to "alleviate some of the most frequent issues that some players are experiencing". Obviously user settings tweaks weren't the answer to this game's maladies.

We are used to seeing buggy games released and then hurriedly patched by the publishers/developers. Batman: Arkham Night has caused plenty of gamers to complain about how it performs very poorly on their hardware that is well beyond the recommended specs.

A few hours ago the game developers, Rocksteady Studios, and publishers, Warner Bros Games, seem to have decided enough was enough and acted to suspend sales of the PC game. The main message of official statement read as follows:

"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."

In the meantime the developers will keep an eye on all the official community and Steam community threads harvesting the "valuable feedback" about the game. The developers ask that those who have already purchased the game be patient while bugs are ironed out. Alternatively it is suggested that you could apply for a refund via Steam or the store at which you purchased the game. Refunds aren't being offered carte blanche however, to get a refund you must qualify under Steam's refund policies, for example (i.e. owned game less than 2 weeks, play time of under 2 hours accumulated).

Batman: Arkham Knight, which launched last Tuesday, doesn't seem to have caused many problems for PS4 and Xbox One users. If any HEXUS readers have been playing this new game and have had good or bad experiences please let us know in the comments below.



HEXUS Forums :: 25 Comments

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“Batman: Arkham Night” I am the night.

Disappointing to see another PC release bodged this badly, considering Unity still isn't incredible from what I hear. I'm just glad I'm not involved with the series at all, this must be a nightmare for all the people wanting to play the game.
Sort of makes you wonder what QA they had… From the sound of it, it has problems on most hardware - if so why wasn't it picked up? You wouldn't expect them to test every hardware combo but you think they would test a few variations.
QA is quickly overuled by profit pushers/sales. Got to get that quarterly in y'know…

I enjoyed prior games, the last one I didn't play as it was a prequel and I couldn't be bothered with that - this time though I was very interested until I saw the ridiculous pricing structure, £30 for a season pass? You must be off your rocker.
This is another case of “Get it out the door quick and hope some poot schmucks buy it before it's reviewed” it seems.

Unless the game wasn't Q/A tested… at all, then they Have to have know just how buggy and resource hogging it is.

It's time games developers and publishers went back to the golden age of Disc released games pre 2005, when people thought Broadband was something tennis players wore to keep the sweat out of their eyes. Back then games had to be nearly bug free on release.

Minor patches for things beyond the scope of testing like the game crashing when run on an i7 3820 with R9 280, 64GB Corsair ram with 1Tb Samsung HD. Stuff like that happens, fair enough and if you're the unlucky 1 in a million consumer you need to wait for a small patch. Brown stuff happens.

Beyond that 99%, of the time games should work flawlessly out of the box (or fresh from the download). We shouldn't have to wait 2-3 months (or more) to be able to play a game we paid full price for.

It's gotten so bad lately, I refuse to buy a game until it's at least been reviewed and proven playable and relatively bug free on launch. If it's not such within 1 month of release, I refuse to pay more that 25% of retail price for it, simply as a mark of the disrespect of the developer/publisher has for the consumer, so will I lose respect for them.
To be honest the biggest insult is that this game runs on Unreal Engine 3. That engine is so old and so tried and tested that it should be near impossible to create this big a disaster of a PC release and yet they still managed it. If there were the usual minor issues fair enough, UE3 took a little while to mature IIRC, but creating an AC:Unity within UE3 in 2015? That takes some effort or extreme incompetence.