Warner Bros has shaken the gaming landscape with their latest monumental move. In a bid to get ahead of troubles caused by the Batman Arkham Knight launch, Warner Bros is taking the radical step of suspending all sales until most issues have been fixed. While urging patience on the hand of fans, for those seriously unhappy with the game, WB has pointed out that they can refund either through Steam or their retail locations.
Community Admin Yorrick released a statement on both the Steam community and Batman Arkham Knight site. The key parts are as follows:
We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards… [and]… do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall….We [will] work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played.
Suspending sales while fixes are being implemented is a radical step for the publisher to take. Such a move is beyond rare and even other titles that suffered at heavily launch like Watch Dogs did not have their sales suspended. However, given the poor state of reviews, it’s unlikely many gamers will pick up the title and many hardcore fans would have already bought the game, making the loss a sales a moot point. In ensuring the game is actually polished when it is re-released, more gamers are less likely to have a negative image of the Batman series and Warner Bros. Steam’s new refund policy also likely played a huge role as there would be no point in selling a game many might later refund.
From a more negative viewpoint, by removing the title from sale, it means that WB knows that the game was released prematurely and requires a considerable amount of time to fix, so much so that taking the game out of sale is required. While a laudable move, WB should have just delayed the PC launch as GTA:V did and released a finished game later than the console versions. Hopefully, other developers will take note of this and make sure their releases are suitable for release on launch day. Even massive day one patches, can’t solve everything if the patches don’t fix everything.
After they re-release the game again, make it 50% cheaper on the market, the damage had already been done.