Update: Batman Arkham Knight
Batman Arkham Knight has now joined a very select club of games, ones which have been removed from Steam. Albeit admittedly by the game’s publisher, Warner Brothers. In the last two days, since Voletic did a PSA warning potential consumers against purchasing the title, it has come to light that the development team hired an external studio, Iron Galaxy, to create the PC port of the title. While this practice is not unknown, it has led to issues in the past; probably the most egregious example being Aliens:Colonial Marines – which was completed by the now-defunct TimeGate Studios the creators of Section 8.
Gary Lake-Schaal, Warner Brother’s VP of Game technology for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment had this to say:
“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.”
While there is clearly a fair amount of corporate speak to the statement, these appear to be the words of someone who has been caught a little off-guard. And, given the controversy, Warner Bros have done the correct thing and temporarily pulled the title off of store shelves while they fix the game’s larger issues. You can detect the real mood of the conversation in the comments section of the page, the voices of many disgruntled consumers who, frankly, were not expecting a major title to ship in this condition. A trend that has been happening a little too often as of late.
Hopefully Warner Bros. will release the PC version of the game quickly and optimise it properly.