Why the Batman: Arkham Knight Situation Is Both Good and Bad For PC Gamers

Wow, what a great Comic-Con. I don’t know about you, but those trailers for Suicide Squad and Batman V Superman have me really hyped for those movies. Now I just want to play the latest Batman game on my trusty PC and… what’s that? Batman: Arkham Knight on PC has been pulled from sale? Why would that happen? No matter, I pre-ordered the Steam Premium Edition with the Season Pass, let me just install and play it… OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL KIND OF FRAMERATE IS THIS.

Hi there, I’m a PC gamer with a copy of Batman: Arkham Knight. I was going to review it for this very site but circumstances forced me not to, meaning “Warner Bros and Rocksteady released a broken pile of broken brokenness with a Batmobile on the cover and then pulled it from sale because it was more broken than even Arkham Origins”. This has left me in something of a quandary. On one side I want to cheer the rights of PC gamers to get a decent product and congratulate Warner Bros on committing to fixing it, on the other hand I’m both suspicious of their motives and cursing that I’m not getting the Batgirl DLC on time.

First off, a list of the problems I personally have encountered with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight: extreme performance dips to unplayable levels if I’m playing the game in anything but Low settings. A terrible 30 FPS cap that actually doesn’t lock the framerate or stop it going far lower. Not being able to turn off Motion Blur or turn on High textures without digging into the .ini files. Owning the Premium Edition on Steam yet not being allowed access to the Steam-exclusive ‘Gotham’s Future’ skin pack or the Harley Quinn DLC. Certain textures remaining blurred even though they’re necessary to work out Riddler’s Riddles. And I’ve had it easier than many! Check out the PC Support forums for hours of fun.

Clearly this is unacceptable. Gamers were outraged, swarmed onto forums and vented their anger to high heavens. Reports claim that Warner Bros was totally aware of the condition the game was in and I believe them because the problems are impossible to miss. So, on to the solution. Warner Bros and Rocksteady have suspended sales of the PC version and will only re-release the game once they finish working on a patch that gets the game to a playable state, or at least allows Chris Capel to see billboards properly. According to the most recent update this is coming in August.

WHY THIS IS GOOD NEWS

This is one of the biggest games of the year, Warner Bros have a bit of a history of releasing shoddy PC ports (Arkham Origins, Injustice, Mortal Kombat X) but this is the first time they have been shocked into action. At last they have noticed that gamers won’t accept a completely broken game with empty promises of a patch later. At last they notice when people complain, or at least get a massive amount of returns because Steam Refunds are now a thing. Power to the PC people!

Now with Batman: Arkham Knight off sale, the promises of a full patch are much more believable. Warner Bros are losing money daily and have a crapton of bad PR to wash away, so unless they fix the game properly this will haunt them all the way to their next big release. They have to get it right. They’re even risking gamers not buying the DLC, which is unprecedented.

Then we have the future of course. No one will trust Warner Bros or Rocksteady again until they prove themselves, so Injustice 2 and Batman: Arkham World or whatever will have to be at least moderately good ports so this situation won’t happen again. They know PC gamers won’t stand for this sort of thing anymore, and thanks to Steam and their new refund policy we can hit the publishers where it hurts: in the wallet. We could be looking at the end of bad PC ports. Hooray for Arkham Knight being f***ed!

… AND WHY THIS IS POTENTIALLY BAD NEWS

Publishers and big companies have a real nasty habit of learning the wrong lessons.

When Catwoman and Elektra failed at the box office, they thought “audiences don’t want female superhero movies” rather than “audiences want good female superhero movies”. When Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk stopped selling Activision thought “no one wants these types of games anymore” instead of the correct “we milked these franchises into oblivion, better not do that again”. If people want to mod GTA5, Rockstar thinks “those dirty cheaters want to ruin our precious game, we better stop them” rather than “people love GTA5 and want to have more fun with it”. And I’m worried that Warner Bros won’t learn the right lesson here either.

We want WB, and other publishers, to learn the lesson that bad PC ports are unacceptable and that they shouldn’t crap out a half-hearted product, and if they do it’ll cost them sales. What they instead could very well decide is that it’s not worth publishing on Steam because refunds are too easy, or even worse not make a PC version of their games at all. The piracy excuse has always been pulled out before, but with gamers’ ability to get refunds for sub-par products publishers might just decide that the PC is just too risky to put games on… or worse, put them on their own digital platform instead as EA and Ubisoft have done, complete with no refunds. From there on we get Watch_Dogs (still unplayable on many PCs, including mine) and SimCity (still a crap game) as standard.

Then of course we have the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. GTA5 took over two years and two generations of console releases to come out but the PC version is now the definitive edition, but everyone slagged Rockstar for taking so long. GTA4 took a few months and was broken, and everyone slagged Rockstar for delivering a shoddy product. Would PC gamers have hated Rocksteady and Warner Bros if they said “PS4/XB1 in June, PC in September” and flooded the game’s forums with complaints? Hell yes they would have. Don’t get me wrong, getting it on time and right is the best solution, but where is the incentive for publishers to bother releasing things on PC if things can’t be done correctly on time?

And don’t get me started on Season Pass content. Batman: Arkham Knight was rightly criticized for offering a Season Pass for the silly price of £32.99/$39.99, but a fair number of people bought it expecting an epic stream of Batman-related content (the best kind of content). But because the game’s been pulled Warners have decided PC Season Pass/Premium Edition owners shouldn’t get the DLC they’ve already paid for on time because, well, the game’s not out. Yes they should concentrate on patching but that’s an engine and programming problem - it’s not related to the content itself, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get new content. Plus any man who stands between me and this 1989 Tim Burton Batman skin and Batmobile will die where he stands.

WHY SO SERIOUS?

I can’t help it, I’m worried, and not just because the current rumour pegs the game as not coming out until September at the earliest, which fits with the latest reports of “an interim patch” coming next month. Yes it’s great that Warner Bros are acknowledging the terrible issues and cutting out their sales to fix them, even if it’s just because of Steam Refunds, but do they even truly care? And will they decide that PC versions of their games are just too much of an effort to get right for too little reward and cut those versions out entirely? Will other publishers follow suit, as undoubtedly all the big names are watching this incident and taking notes? Plus what do poor naive Arkham Knight PC Season Pass holders actually get out of all this, other than a “cheers mate” and the promise that they’ll get everything eventually even if it’s months after the console version?

The cautionary tale of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC is going to be an important one to PC gaming, for bad and good I fear. It represents the moment where a big publisher acknowledged their mistakes in letting out a shoddy product and discovered that the PC community won’t stand for that sort of thing anymore. However it could also be the moment where WBPlay becomes another Origin or Uplay. Or worse, where Warner Bros and even other publishers give up on PC altogether.

Time will tell whether the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight is a force for good or evil, a blessing or a curse. For now though we can only wait and pray, and hope to high heaven that things work out for the best, that bad PC ports are a thing of the past rather than PC ports in general, and I get to cruise around Gotham in the greatest Batmobile ever sooner rather than later.

C’mon Rocksteady, give us the patch our city needs. And Warner Bros… we still want Arkham Origins 2, y’know? Just make sure that turning off Motion Blur doesn’t crash the game or Verifying System Files doesn’t corrupt half the install, ‘kay? Cheers.

• Written by Chris Capel