It’s not being linked directly from the front page yet, but you can bet if they went to the trouble of making a separate bundle for it that it’s coming soon.
Publishers have started to work out that bad Steam reviews are something to be avoided. Of course, they have no control over what the gaming public feels and writes — and when they try to exercise some measure of control, through review manipulations or flagging negative reviews, it always backfires.
So what’s the next step? To create a bundle on Steam that just contains the game you want to sell — because that way, it doesn’t show Steam reviews. After all, what if you wanted to bundle hundreds of things in the same package?
To their credit, Warner Bros aren’t linking to the new bundle from the front page yet. The listing in Steam’s featured items this morning goes directly to the individual game, where Arkham Knight’s stellar 46% user rating is on full display.
You can’t find this fancy new bundle (which contains just Arkham Knight) by searching for all Rocksteady or Warner Bros games, however. There’s always the chance someone at WB created a new Steam entry just, well, because they could.
We’ll wait and see how it plays out. Hopefully enough people notice and WB decide to cut their losses rather than trying something fancy to pick up a port of a game so dodgy that the developers have suggested having 12GB of RAM and a PC imported from Krypton to guarantee stability.
Comments
6 responses to “Warner Bros Might Be Using That Bundling Trick With Batman: Arkham Knight”
Goddamn it I’ve got a pc from the Phantom Zone, I’m screwed…
It’s weird because the normal price is $49.99, not $89.99. Unless it’s the premium bundle, which is $89.99. If it’s that, they’ve created a bundle for a bundle… (which I’m down for if it makes it cheaper)
It gets worse, I checked into that bundle and the game is the standard version at the deluxe price reduced to the standard price, otherwise it would of linked to the deluxe page.
Hidden Game only Bundle:
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/85499/
Right-Click links to:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/208650/
Deluxe version link:
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/85500/
Hidden Bundle is basically the Deluxe cost ‘reduced’ to the game only cost with only the Standard game in it, to make it look like a bargain.
This is the dodgiest thing that AAA publishers have started to pull this year. Hopefully everyone who sees this bundle will question why Arkham Knight is being sold for such a huge discount, as well as why it has such an insanely high price to begin with.
It’d be great if Valve introduced some sort of Steam review representation for bundles like this. They’d probably take their sweet time implementing it, but it’d be a decent way to deal with these shady bundles.
It is very likely Batman Arkham Knight will be bundled by Warner Brothers, as this a way to sell more games that may not have sold so well on it’s own.
However, Batman Arkam Knight is a great game, so if it’s bundled it will probably be with other top games.
does anyone seriously give a shit about this on pc anymore?