Crud. Crud, crud, crud well at least I haven’t bought it yet:
Warner Bros., the publisher of Rocksteady’s latest release, Batman: Arkham Knight, has released an official statement announcing the suspension of all future sales of Arkham Knights PC copy. Furthermore, the publisher has also revealed that they will be issuing refunds to all consumers who were unhappy with the product. You can view the full statement here.
Apparently it did not port over to the PC well. Which is, as they say, not good. Penny Arcade has more on this, including the bemused observation that, once upon a time, you just accepted this sort of thing when it happened. Apparently, no more…
Games are a big business and – surprisingly – customers are starting to demand that basic fitness for its particular purpose be met.
I’ve worked in the industry for the last decade and bad PC ports always anger me. These games are DEVELOPED on PCs. Maybe not always for mouse and keyboard, but with ubiquitous gamepad support nowadays, you’d think it would be super easy. But of courser, there are reasons. PC’s not a single standard target, sales are lower with higher piracy rates, graphics programming for PC is more art than science due to heavy abstraction and hidden behavior in the graphics drivers, etc. This will get better with DX12 and Mantle but it’s amazing how lousy PC development can be.
I’ll note that I’m halfway through Arkham Knight on the PC and I’m not having any problems with it, other than a crash or two. I’m not sure if I just have a blessed configuration or if my fellow “PC Master Race” (and that’s a bad term to be throwing around after last week) people are just whining over trivialities. I’ll note that I was playing Arkham Origins prior to Knight coming out and Knight seems a lot more stable than AO did.
I’m about 30% through, it works well on my machine. Two fans went on my crossfired radeon 6700 (i.e. a fan per card, two cards together) about a month and a half ago and I replaced them with 1 radeon R9 200 card. The single card is much better than the dual cards from several years ago.
I would recommend “Sunless Sea” and “Darkest Dungeon” two roguelike games I picked up for about $5 a piece when on sale…
I’d add that Sunless Sea is in the same world as the Echo Bazaar/Fallen London. Perhaps lighter on the horror than Sunless Sea, but not the same kind of game.
It wasn’t that we accepted it. It’s that we had no recourse. Opened software may not be returned, and all that. (Supposedly to prevent piracy.)
It’s also not like we had prior warning. Reviewers evidently never had problems. And issues wouldn’t be admitted until after the first month or two of sales. (Bethesda especially seemed to hate my guts.)