Batman flops miserably on PC

One of the most anticipated games of the summer, Batman Arkham Knight has seen one of the most horrendous launches for the PC in recent history. While the game by RockSteady has received a lot of praise on the consoles, the PC port is so bad that it had to be pulled off Steam temporarily until the issues have been sorted. So let us analyse how and why this happened, and why has there been such a strong backlash from the PC community towards RockSteady as well as NVIDIA.

To start things off, the PC port was outsourced to a third party company, and the developers conveniently “forgot” to mention this. Moreover, the game doesn’t come cheap, it is a $60 game with the season pass coming in at a whopping $40, so a lot of the people who bought the game ended up paying a $100 on Steam. What went wrong? Just prior to its release, it was declared that the game would be locked at 30 frames per second on the PC, much to everyone’s outrage. The PC is a platform that has been used to at least 60 frames per second for over five years now. What peeved people off even more was that prior to the release, NVIDIA showcased the game at 1080p/60 FPS, knowing full well that the finished product was to be far from what was being shown. If this wasn’t bad enough, the incompetence of the studio handling the port shone through as majority of the players were reporting crashes on their machines, which had nothing to do with hardware shortcomings.

It is good to see however that RockSteady has owned up to their mistake and are doing everything to sort out their game via an update. Websites like GreenManGaming have promised a full refund to all who have bought the game for the PC if the first update doesn’t solve their issues; the game has even been pulled down from the Steam Marketplace and can no longer be purchased for the PC online. This is yet another example of corporate greed trumping customer satisfaction, and this worrying trend is only growing in the gaming industry with many games being released in near unplayable states. Another recent example is that of Mortal Kombat X, which again, while being brilliant on consoles, was absolute garbage on the PC until subsequent patches fixed the game.