Even with a few months of furious fixing under its utility belt, the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight is still disappointing cape enthusiasts everywhere with its dodgy performance and stability. With little recourse after suspending sales on Steam while emergency work was conducted, publisher Warner Bros. is now offering refunds for the game and season pass to all comers.
No problem if you’ve owned the game / played it for longer than two hours, you can still get a refund, as is explained in the following post on Arkham Knight‘s community hub:
We are very sorry that many of our customers continue to be unhappy with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight. We worked hard to get the game to live up to the standard you deserve but understand that many of you are still experiencing issues.
Until the end of 2015, we will be offering a full refund on Batman: Arkham Knight PC, regardless of how long you have played the product. You can also return the Season Pass along with the main game (but not separately). For those of you that hold onto the game, we are going to continue to address the issues that we can fix and talk to you about the issues that we cannot fix.
Sadly it seems Arkham Knight on PC is a lost cause — hopefully Warner and Rocksteady can learn an important lesson from the disaster, both in terms of PR and sales. Not sure if there’s much either party can do about the loss of consumer confidence however.
Announcement on Refunds [Steam]
Comments
24 responses to “Steam Refunds For Batman: Arkham Knight Until 2016”
Rocksteady are so deserving of a full frontal nadger kicking right now.
For being better than steams refund policy?
Mostly for the second half of this quote:
Cannot fix? Seriously?
Yeah, I can see how that would piss some people off, so can WB, that’s why they are offering refunds till the end of the year.
Seems reasonable to me, if they “cant” (wont) fix something that stops it running adequately on my system then I should get a refund so I could buy it for a system that the game works for. Or a game from their competition if I refuse to play on console.
Rocksteady are getting a lot of crap for something that seems like it had little to do with them. I’d be heaping the blame on WB. If a dev says that they can’t fix something, it’s probably because their publisher has said “no more”.
The scary part about this is that I don’t think they’ve lost much consumer confidence. After Origins we shouldn’t have had confidence in Knight. Someone gave that game the thumbs up to be sold for $89 but we made excuses for that. It wasn’t Rocksteady, it wasn’t a ‘real’ Arkham game, etc. I can’t help but feel like we’ll make excuses for Knight if another Arkham game comes around. Just look at Fallout 4. We all want the game so bad that we’re ignoring that historically 3D Fallout games have had terrible quality issues at launch. In theory I should know better than to buy a Fallout game at launch but I’m sitting here with it pre-loaded on my XBOX and I’m not alone.
I’m not blaming gamers for games like Arkham Knight (PC), but it seems like as a group we’re delusional in a way publishers and developers can easily exploit. We allow ourselves to be convinced to dismiss negative thoughts about games because we want them to be good, and that allows them to sell us garbage with minimal consequences.
Yep…same situation for me.
Need for Speed is preloaded on my PS4, I’m froffin for the fifth, yet I KNOW it’ll be all kinds of fucked up. Fingers crossed, but if history is anything to go by…
From what I saw in the EB Games Expo, NFS looked very solid in terms of game play and build. I talked to one of the publishers, and the development team behind NFS have taken all the criticisms and feedback from Rivals, the last game. They have then worked hard to give fans what they want. Less online compulsory rubbish and more solid game play experiences.
I have a lot more faith in NFS compared to Fallout 4 at the moment. 😉
The fact that there is no live game play to be seen at the EB Expo or even at Pax for 2015 just a few weeks before launch implies Fall Out 4 is not in a happy place. They could have had a commentator doing a set routine In a stable area, like what was done for Quantum Break on XB1.
Sure, there are lots of points to make for story and game play, and showing clips can speed up the information. But people want to see the game running live, rather than stuff they can see on YouTube.
I don’t care about the Fallout franchise, I have gotten tired of Bethesda overall. But still, it’s not a good sign, especially as the final code is like being manufactured into discs for distribution as we speak. :-\
That’s just paranoia. Just because EB Expo didn’t have it or PAX doesn’t mean a thing, they’re minor in the grand scheme of things. FO4 is a game that can released without a screenshot and it’ll sell millions. If they had of missed something like E3? That would speak volumes. But they didn’t, they unveiled it where necessary and haven’t been whoring it out like a lot of other devs do to their properties. That’s how you build anticipation.
I don’t see a single aspect of commentary there giving logical credibility to ‘that’s not a good sign’ unfortunately other than basically “They haven’t let us play it so it must suck!”.
I’ll agree that it’s a bit paranoid to say that with certainty and Bethesda love secrecy so it’s not unusual, but I don’t think it’s a crazy line of questioning. I don’t remember but I’m guessing New Vegas dodged hands on demos and protecting the hype campaign from quality concerns would have been a factor.
This is sort of what I’m talking about. You’re standing here insisting that it’s unreasonable and unfair to question what state this game is going to launch in because we’d all rather not address their track record. “What are you doing to ensure players save files won’t be randomly corrupted this time” is one of the major questions to ask Bethesda in an interview, but we’d crucify @markserrels if he asked that without soft balling it in for a pre-written positive PR piece. We’d be throwing cabbage at him and insisting Kotaku fire this guy who clearly just got into journalism as part of some insane crusade against the honest, hard working, loving people at Bethesda.
We make excuses for publishers, studios and products that we like and in a lot of ways it makes us just as responsible for Arkham Knight (PC)’s launch as the people calling the shots.
So basically people can’t say anything positive about Bethesda, etc, or else you’ll just accuse them of making excuses.
You’re a joke.
That’s a rather grand assumption? Where on *earth* did I say that? *scans back over comment*
I didn’t say that. Stop trying to put words in my mouth.
What I *said* was the game is that popular, it’ll get released and sell millions.
What’s the difference between Bethesda and Rocksteady at this point? Bethesda rushed out patches to address the problems. The sickening memory leak in FO3 that ground loading times to up to 10 minutes or more on loading screens, the corruption of save files etc. They actually released patches promptly that fixed an already *working* game. Loading times were ass sure, but it still worked.
Bethesda have never been about giant shows before the product was ready to launch (patches not withstanding) as they usually prefer the product to stand for itself. They’re not a perfect company, but their track record stands head and shoulders above Rocksteady and WB at this moment in time.
What I AM saying however, and what I DID say, is that to simply assume something because it didn’t debut at an expo is *stupid*. It’s assuming, the motherfucker of all mistakes.
An assumption, is generally based on opinion, rarely ever on fact. Hence why they’re assumptions. So if there’s solid, concrete evidence it’ll be crap, I’m the first who would love seeing it to warn me off buying it, but honestly, there’s been none so far.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth and I think that came off way more of an accusation than I intended, but you did say a hard no to the idea that there was potentially a link between the game being video only pre-release and the state of the game. You called him paranoid and listed a bunch of reasons why it’s ok to be dismissive of his observation. Your reasons are totally valid. Bethesda neither want nor need to give people a hands on of their game. There’s nothing unusual about how they handled the expos in question. I agree with your points I just don’t agree with shooting him down here. Yeah he’s assuming the worst, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a reason to.
You’ve got to admit it’s not exactly a baseless accusation. I wouldn’t send anyone to prison over it but I think even Bethesda would admit that after New Vegas players have the right to be weary. I wouldn’t call it concrete evidence that Fallout 4 will suck, but there’s a couple of games that show that Bethesda are willing to not mention the rough edges and release two or three patches early.
His assumption is a lot more solid than my assumption that Bethesda only release less than perfect games when they’re 100% sure they can patch the problems out right away. Yet people are more than happy to hear my assumption.
@kasterix I’m not saying you can’t say anything positive about Bethesda. I’m saying nobody, myself included, wants to hear anything negative about them because we don’t want to be reminded that there’s a chance our Fallout 4 experience will involve crashes or restarts. What I meant by making excuses was making excuses to ourselves. We aren’t simply listening to other people make excuses we’re making them ourselves. When Arkham Knight launched I pushed thoughts of Arkham Origins away. I gave myself a bunch of reasons to distance the two. I used that as a way to ignore the similarities. I played on the XBOX One so I didn’t get burned like PC users, but I still shouldn’t have ignored Origins the way I did.
For the record, I don’t have any real problem with Bethesda. They’ve done great things, made great games and seem to genuinely want to please their community. I defended their role in the paid mods incident because I felt they were trying to do something positive for the modders even if the execution wasn’t perfect (I didn’t defend it, but I feel like even Horse Armor was an attempt to give the community what they wanted, as dumb as it was).
In fact the only thing I dislike about them is their attitude towards keeping everything under wraps until the last minute. The only reason why I brought them up here is because Fallout 4 is about to come out and a lot of us have chosen to ignore previous launches that should have been very damaging to consumer confidence.
This is their not-so-subtle admission that the game will never be truly “fixed”. At this point it seems like the only way to get the port up to an acceptable, stable standard would be to completely bin the existing port and start from scratch with someone like Monolith or Avalanche handling it. And since that would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to do, WB aren’t interested in doing it for the minuscule amount of money they’d make back.
Oh well. I’ll just wait for an SLi patch and see if that helps – although something tells me either a) the patch will never come, or b) it’ll come out and the performance will still be absolute shite.
Or hand it out to the community who would likely fix it in a tenth of the time lol
THIS! So much this!
I’m kinda sad that I can’t get it refunded since I preordered the retail box online from a site overseas. atleast my preorder only cost 30 aud, not massively out of pocket. Lost much more on much worse (thief 4).
I haven’t refunded it yet, and I guess I’m naive in thinking they will fix it. Batman Arkham City and Origins have the same stutter issue (not as bad as Arkham Knight) – that is really related to the Nvidia features – namely physx. If you disable those features (cool as they may be) usually games run heaps better. Borderlands and other Unreal engine games are the same. The problem is that physx does add a lot to the games, so it’s hard to disable it, especially when it causes random dips, and nothing constant.
I haven’t loaded up Arkham Knight yet, but my fear is – like people have suggested – the game will never be fixed…maybe I should just refund it.
The very first sentence in the apology is blaming users for having problems. This is the absolute minimum a company can get away with and still maintain the illusion of caring about the consumer.
Seems to run quite well on my machine now, so I’ll just stick with it and have even picked up some of the DLC.
It seems like the sort of game you’d want to wait to buy the GOTY version in a steam sale in a couple of years when your (hopefully) more modern PC can just power through the problems.
The game is a bit overwhelming with the amount of content so if it’s running well now you’re probably better off not waiting for the GOTY edition. For the most part the DLC is good but oddly enough even though the DLC is a little short when it’s all combined with the main game it puts a little too much on your plate.
You’re gonna hate Mad Max then… :O
I wonder what the actual issue is with the game or developers. I mean lets face it, they aren’t amateur developers and (unless I am wrong) it seems the problem is generally isolated to the PC platform.
I don’t remember Arkham Asylum or City having these problems ?? Arkham City used Unreal Engine 3, the same as Arkham Knight.
Logan can you ask warner brothers about people who have bought from stores and for whom a refund is being refused? What are we supposed to do ?
Talk to the ACCC maybe? If the manufacturer of the product has declared the product refundable due to these issues, maybe the ACCC could help in getting a refund from a retail store? I’m sure there is something in the Australian Consumer Law that would cover you. http://www.consumerlaw.gov.au