Warner Bros Suspends Sales of Batman: Arkham Knight PC Version

https://community.wbgames.com/t5/Support-for-PC/June-24-Update-on-PC-Version-of-Arkham-Knight/m-p/575332#U575332

by minimaxir • 11 years ago

164 134 11 years ago

community.wbgames.com

thescribe• 11 years ago

It seems there are quiet a few issues with this port. I wonder if this is a result of rushing QA?

kevingadd• 11 years ago

Stuff this dramatic would have been noticed by QA, and almost certainly known to the programmers. The publisher decided to ship it in this state.

minimaxir4• 11 years ago

It should be noted that Warner Bros also recently published MKX on PC, which had similar issues. http://www.gamespot.com/articles/mortal-kombat-x-pc-patch-pu...

georgehotelling• 11 years ago

Someone uncovered a Steam ID that suggests the PC developer Iron Galaxy only received the game 2 months ago: https://steamdb.info/sub/45433/

Negitivefrags• 11 years ago

All that means is that they started the steam integration two months ago. That isn't an unreasonable time frame.

Adam_O• 11 years ago

A lot of game companies develop their AAAs with PS4/X1 in mind and the PC port is more of an afterthought. Though not the case here, it is usually released up to 6 months after the console version. I believe PC versions of games are often done by an external (or at least different) studio, and they are also assigned less Dev/QA resources. The responsibility for the quality of the PC port does not always fall on the management in charge of the console version, so a lot of faults can slip through the cracks.

tacticus2• 11 years ago

the previous 2 rocksteady (Batman AA and batman AC) games were developed concurrently for 360,ps3 and pc. the first party development resulted in an excellent game that was highly regarded on all the platforms.

Origins was developed console first and ported by iron galaxy. the port was atrociously bad. you could not finish the game. the main story line was bugged so hard that you could tell that the developers had never done anything more than walk around the first mission.

minimaxir4• 11 years ago

The suspension is likely happening due to many, many technical issues with the port: http://kotaku.com/batman-arkham-knights-pc-version-is-a-mess...

The average rating for the game on Steam was 31%. Since this was the first AAA game to be released on Steam after the release of Steam Refunds, it's also suspected that a high number of returns could force drastic action.

bane• 11 years ago

Steam could be a major force in turning around the recent slew of absolutely craptastic, completely broken, game releases recently.

QA/QC should not happen at the customer level.

minimaxir4• 11 years ago

Steam could be a major force in turning around the recent slew of absolutely craptastic, completely broken, game releases recently.

This is an interesting comment because the primary suspected reason for the implementation of Steam Refunds was Steam Greenlight, which allows anyone to upload a game to Steam, and after community vetting, the game could be released on the store proper.

Of course, many of the games were either poorly tested or use assets which the developers claim as original but are not. Steam Refunds fixes this in most cases

Jim Sterling has a good showcase of these games: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRceUcRZcK17mlpIEPsV...

SilasX3• 11 years ago

"We don't need unit tests because we have integration tests. We don't need integration tests because we have QA acceptance tests. We don't need QA acceptance tests because end users will report any bugs to us. We don't listen to user feedback because declining sales will tip us off to the problems. We don't pay attention to sales numbers because creditors seizing our assets will alert us of the shortcoming."

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

Steam could be a major force in turning around the recent slew of absolutely craptastic, completely broken, game releases recently.
QA/QC should not happen at the customer level.

With the exception of games running under Linux https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757382 :).

ngoldbaum• 11 years ago

If this sort of thing is par for the course for buggy PC ports going forward, then I guess Steam refunds will be a positive force. I gather Valve added the new refund system in response to EU consumer protection laws. I'm glad they exist, maybe the US should have laws requiring refunds on game purchases as well.

serge2k4• 11 years ago

I think they added it in response to increasingly bad PR about their atrocious customer support.

ryandrake• 11 years ago

We still have people planning to "port" software anymore? I thought we all learned how to design things cross-platform by now. This isn't 1995.

eru4• 11 years ago

Games make more extensive use of the hardware (and hardware specific libraries) than your typical CRUD application.

A layer of abstraction above the different libraries can help, but often at the cost of a performance hit that you don't want in games.

Different input mechanisms (mouse and keyboard vs gamepad) need different input schemes to be fun.

Console games are usually played sitting on a couch in front of a TV. Sitting at a desk with a computer monitor much closer can also make a difference in what UIs (eg game HUDs) work well.

I have no clue what was involved in porting the Batman game, but your blanket statement about porting as a solved problem doesn't cut it.

An interesting example of a well-done port from PC to iPad is the game FTL. They changed the interface to feel native on the iPad. Recompiling the code was probably the least of their worries.

oceanstone• 11 years ago

They are using a modified version of Unreal Engine 3. (Much like X-COM, and its upcoming sequel.)

So this is less of a port, and more of a deployment to a platform that widely varies in terms of performance. And this is much easier to do when your graphics aren't so "next gen".

frik• 11 years ago

Several console first game companies are outsourcing their PC port development.

Sometimes it doesn't work out, like with Batman. It lacks various shader effects like rain and looks graphically worse than on PS4. So the developers already knew the performance was a problem in their PC port and left at least two advanced effects out.

In general give the PC more love, it is more popular than one might think (international view point). PS4 is a pretty strong platform (22+ mio sold), which cannot be said from the competitors console platforms (around 10 mio or less).

nailer4• 11 years ago

Exactly. There's only twenty people working on the PC version according to Batman's credits.

tomswartz07• 11 years ago

I don't have the game to confirm, but a lot of folks are reporting that the actual game files are ~20Gb less than the recommended space requirements.

It makes one wonder if the game is actually missing a huge chunk of files.

batmanthehorse• 11 years ago

Maybe they added a bunch of headroom because storage is cheap and they want to make sure you don't run into problems with caches, swapping, DLC, etc.

lmkg• 11 years ago

Could be that the installer needs a certain amount of swap space.

Alternatively, it could be "we tested it with this much free and it worked, we don't have time/budget to test again with less space."

thejosh• 11 years ago

And issues like these are why you should never preorder PC games. They have an unlimited amount of copies, so it's not like you will be waiting weeks for something. Is a tiny preorder bonus really worth the risk of gambling your money?

Now Steam has introduced refunds, you can refund a game if you haven't played more than 2 hours, and a few weeks haven't passed.

eru4• 11 years ago

If it's a small company, you might want to give them money up front to help them keep afloat. Steam has early-acces games for that reason.

(It's better than pre-order, since you get to play the unfinished game earlier, if you want to. If you choose early-access but wait for the official release before you run it, it's exactly the same as pre-order.)

adamrezich2• 11 years ago

Right, but you should only give them money if the product that they have on Early Access is already fun, right?

Take Rust (the game, not the language) for instance. They cobbled together what is now known as "Rust Legacy" as a sort of demo of what they wanted the game to be. Thousands of people bought it. Now Facepunch is using the funds from all those sales to completely rework the game from the ground-up. Now it's better than Rust Legacy, and only going to get better and more interesting.

But if Rust Legacy wasn't fun, nobody would've bought it. TL;DR: don't preorder (including early access!) games purely on promise alone.

josu• 11 years ago

They usually give away free DLCs when you preorder.

zamalek• 11 years ago

If the game is terrible you won't play those DLCs anyway. If the game is good you will have reason to purchase the DLCs when they are released.

Pre-ordering is designed to specifically work around bad reviews a.k.a. releasing poor quality games and getting away with it. The publisher is screwing you and you are paying them to.

Big publishers have no other reason to implement pre-orders. It is a shit-game risk mitigation strategy.

efraim3• 11 years ago

Then why not preorder to get the bonus and refund if it's broken? Looks to me like Steam solved the preorder problem when they introduced refunds.

flashman• 11 years ago

The only time I'll pre-order a game is when the game won't get made otherwise (like Kickstarter or Early Access), and I have loads of faith in the developer. Luckily I haven't been burned yet (though I consider Star Citizen a near-run thing until it delivers). Bonus if the game is already in a playable and enjoyable state.

Pre-ordering a AAA game? No thanks. Most pre-order bonuses aren't worthwhile because they can't offer people too much or retail purchasers will get pissed off.

serge2k4• 11 years ago

40% off at GMG is one reason.

Limited editions are another. AKA, I WANT MY PIP BOY.

BinaryIdiot2• 11 years ago

I'm not surprised they suspended it but I wonder why they even released it. A vast majority of games that are released for consoles end up having a delayed PC version so why didn't they just delay it even for a short time?

For what it's worth the game is really fun to play on a console.

Slightly off topic: am I the only one who had to open developer tools to hide the huge spoiler modal because no key combination / refresh / mouse clicking would get rid of it? That was frustrating.

hudell• 11 years ago

I was in mobile and I found no way to close that modal.

breakingcups3• 11 years ago

Should've clicked the big link at the bottom of the modal which says "Continue to forums".

BinaryIdiot2• 11 years ago

This was not displayed for me, smart ass. They have the CSS so that it doesn't work very well at all resolutions. No matter what I tried I couldn't see the bottom edge of the modal.

yaeger• 11 years ago

I bet it was an executive decision. The game was already delayed. Twice. They probably decided to push out what they had for PC just so they wouldn't have to announce another delay. For the PC version only, of course. While simultaneously releasing the console versions.

My guess is, they thought even though it is buggy, they can fix it with patches and will only get minor flack for this from the PC users. And that this would be the better choice than to anger every PC gamer by announcing the third delay.

Well, now it is clear that this was the wrong decision. They both, underestimated just how broken the game was and how incomplete compared to the console version and they forgot about Valve's newly introduced refund system.

WBGames can claim that they suspended this game for PC but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say it was Valve that suspended this game because they were tired of processing so many refunds. They would have said "A game that gets this many negative reviews and all are claiming horrible performance and missing effects must clearly be broken and therefore we shouldn't continue to sell it as it will only lead to even more refund claims."

A couple of interesting things to note: 1. They removed the PC logo from all Arkham Knight pages. 2. The company itself tells people about how to request refunds 3. The company also asks for patience while this is being worked out

The last two are somewhat contradictory to me. When a company tells customers on their own free will how to get refunds sounds like an admittance to failure and that they do not believe this can be fixed in a timely manner. And then they still ask for patience which sounds like they are working on a solution. Paired with them removing all PC logos from their promo pages for this game really seems weird.

While this announcement was leagues better than the marketing speak of the first announcement they did, I think customers still need more, clearer information what is going to happen. People who deal in software already know this but the average customer has no idea how long such things can take. Therefore they should explicitly announce what they are going to do. To me, it doesn't sound like patches will do the trick. From all accounts, this pc version sounds broken by design and the root causes are stuck deeeeeep in there. So, if they plan to fix this, then they should announce that an entire rewrite is needed and that this takes time. While at it, they should also tell us who will do this rewrite. I am sure no one wants Iron Galaxy at this again. We want Rocksteady to do it. Because we know they actually can make a Batman game. As evidenced by the ps4 version of this one and the first two games in general. Both ran fine on pc. I already heard speculation that they might try and release this in the fall when they scheduled the SteamOS and Mac version of the game. One can only hope for the sake of the windows version that Rocksteady will not be busy writing these versions and continue to outsource the windows version to the same cracksquad that arsed up this time.

Already__Taken• 11 years ago

Didn't Valve pull Brink shortly after release?

wjoe2• 11 years ago

The Mac and Linux/SteamOS versions are being outsourced to Feral. They've done a good job with XCOM on Mac/Linux and the previous Batman games on Mac so I have confidence in them doing a decent job there. It'd be interesting if their OpenGL implementation actually ends up being better than the Windows DirectX version, but I suspect the issues are at a higher level.

castell2• 11 years ago

Delayed PC version like in GTA V have mainly business reasons. The PC version is usually the most advanced version and the highest graphical details. Some people bought GTA V for PS3/X360, later for PS4/XOne and later for PC.

archagon2• 11 years ago

With my low-end computer (previously mid-range), I've found that even with driver updates and patches, launch performance in games never improves by more than a few FPS. Now, to my knowledge, the problem with Knight is that it runs poorly and is capped to 30. If the pattern continues and Rocksteady can't reliably get it up to 60 (a 2x gain!!), then what happens? The game remains suspended forever?

(In other news, I was really hoping to maybe eke by playing Knight at low/30fps on my Macbook w/discrete Nvidia graphics, but I guess that's not going to happen.)

rjbwork2• 11 years ago

Here's the thing: you're not the person who's raging out over this. Yes, you're part of the demographic who might be upset, but it's people like me, who have stuff like 2x(or more) 980/295x (or better), 3000+MHz DDR4, x99 Processors/Motherboards, all overclocked, with custom cooling solutions and hooked up to G-Sync/FreeSync displays, that are upset. While graphics are not everything, and I play plenty of non-AAA games, a good chunk of the rationale behind even buying AAA games is beautiful graphics and high framerates. With the shit drivers from NVidia, and the absolute tripe so many studios are pumping out these days, I'm questioning the ongoing viability of high-level desktop gaming solutions.

Then, to have the absolute audacity to call a game AAA when it's hard capped at 30fps on PC is just an absolute act of spitting in our faces.

archagon2• 11 years ago

Yeah, it sucks. Unfortunately, it's been sucking for mid-range gamers for a lot longer than that! The idea that a gaming PC can last you for an entire console cycle is a dirty, dirty lie. I guess the bloat is finally seeping up to the high-end.

ux-app2• 11 years ago

I'm a gamer too, and the trend of craptastic console ports is troubling. There are exceptions. GTAV is awesome even on ageing hardware. I have a 660ti and a phenom II, and the game runs wonderfully.

I'm hopeful that the coming VR PC exclusives will lift the quality of PC gaming.

pjc502• 11 years ago

Interesting that you're spending orders of magnitude more on the hardware than on the games.

wjoe2• 11 years ago

On the plus side, at least with that hardware you can probably run the game at a playable framerate. Of course, "playable" isn't really acceptable on hardware like that, but it sounds like at the moment, anything less than dual high end graphics cards gives unplayable performance

ShardPhoenix• 11 years ago

That forum must be really heavily moderated/censored. Based on eg the Battle.net forums I'd have expected to see much angrier posts.

minimaxir4• 11 years ago

The corresponding announcement on Steam has what you're looking for: http://steamcommunity.com/games/208650/announcements/detail/...

anti-shill• 11 years ago

was there a confederate flag on it?!

beedogs• 11 years ago

They must've just run this one through a shell script to port it. Seems like they put the least amount of effort they could into the PC version.

pervycreeper• 11 years ago

Steam refunds, in conjunction with the recent political mobilization of gamers, will change the gaming landscape for the better, allowing developers and consumers to stand in a relationship that begins to approach good faith. This seems to be the first AAA reaction to the new situation, but we have already witnessed the complaints of Steam crapware/shovelware producers, as well as the exit from games of some bad actors (such as Tale of Tales).

recursive• 11 years ago

Does anyone know whether the Xbox version is ok?

rkangel• 11 years ago

There's a nice side benefit here for the fact that I'm always at least 6 months behind games.

I don't have enough time to play games as much as I'd like (i.e. as much as I did as a teenager), so I only play a few selected highlights, and given that, it makes no difference to me if I'm playing the cutting edge or what came out 6 months ago - it normally takes me 6 months to finish something.

This has lots of benefits: You get the community consensus on what is worth playing, not the marketing hype. The game is usually cheaper. The major bugs have been filtered out.

SmellyGeekBoy• 11 years ago

Totally agreed. Why pre-order to get the exclusive content when you can have it 6 months down the line in the "Game Of The Year Edition" - and usually much cheaper and with all of the bugs ironed out. What's not to like? :)

Vaturius• 11 years ago

I think this is an honest and fair decision towards the consumer base. Perhaps they can offer one of the two previous Batman games to make up for the time lost before the update arrives. Let's hope the patch resolves the issues.

alexholehouse• 11 years ago

Technical question - I've seen reports that, "...people who have installed the game to SSD's are apparently getting better performance" [1].

Which implies, to me (both intuitively and having worked on a lot of high performance I/O limited use cases) that part of the issue is read/write speed from the disk? But if that's the case, what kind of software architecture makes sense for a game to have (apparently) real time data processing pulling resources from the disk?

Obviously you need to load maps/games/cutscene etc etc, but this makes it sound like there is constant polling every n-th frame?

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/batman-arkham-knights-launch-appears-...

Warner Bros Suspends Sales of Batman: Arkham Knight PC Version

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