This is not going to be one of those “PC Gaming is dead” articles. With enormously successful titles like League of Legends and Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, it is pretty obvious that PC gaming is not going anywhere, and thanks to successful crowdfunding campaigns for long-dormant genres like space sims (Star Citizen) or CRPGs (Pillars of Eternity), PC gaming is in a better place than ever before…except when it comes to AAA titles from cross-platform publishers.

Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment’s hilariously botched release of Batman: Arkham Knight is clear evidence that not only do major publishers not understand PC gamers, they do not particularly care about them either.

Trending downward

The Arkham series was an unexpected success. Comic book-based games that were actually good? Sign me up.

Starting with 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady Studios created a franchise that made Batman feel like Batman. It had fluid combat, an engaging story, excellent voice acting (courtesy of some of the actors from Batman: The Animated Series), and of course lots and lots of gadgets.

Two years later, Batman: Arkham City expanded on the previous game by giving Batman a massive environment to explore, along with a few new gadgets and some fan-favorite villains. While many reviewers praised Arkham City for its scale, it also received criticism for being less focused than the previous game, and the exploration aspect quickly became repetitive.

The series hit a bit of a misstep with Batman: Arkham Origins, the first in the Arkham line that was not developed by Rocksteady Studios. The game received generally mediocre reviews, mostly for its repetitive gameplay and uninteresting story, and it currently holds Metacritic scores in the mid-seventies (depending on the platform).

Arkham Knight launches…off a cliff

After the less than stellar response to Arkham Origins, Rocksteady promised that the next game in the series, Batman: Arkham Knight, would be a return to form. For the most part that has been the case—except on the PC, where the game is so broken that the publisher was forced to pull it from online stores less than two days after its June 23 release date, and Arkham Knight is still unavailable for purchase through services like Steam.

In fact, a recent leaked email from EB Games obtained by Kotaku Australia suggests that Arkham Knight might not be available for PC again for quite some time.

The email says: “The latest information from Warner is that the updates won’t be available until Spring. Due to this we have made the difficult decision to recall all PC stock from stores to return to the vendor until an acceptable solution is released.”

The email is referring to southern hemisphere Spring, which begins in a little over two months, but it makes no mention of a specific date, so it could be half a year before the PC version of Arkham Knight is fully available.

What went wrong?

So far, the Arkham Knight developers have avoided openly pointing fingers at whom to blame for the game’s laughable PC performance, likely wanting to avoid the sort of nonsense that occurred between Gearbox Software LLC and Sega Holdings Co Ltd over false advertisment for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The studio did however mention that it was “working closely with our external PC development partner to make sure these issues get resolved as quickly as possible.”

Emphasis on the “external,” probably.

Rocksteady apparently outsourced the PC port of Arkham Knight to a third party, which according to the game’s credits is Chicago-based Iron Galaxy Studios. Iron Galaxy also worked on the PC port for Arkham Origins, which also had some performance problems, but none nearly as severe as those found in Arkham Knight. Arkham Origins also had performance problems across the board on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as well, so it is hard to say if Iron Galaxy is entirely to blame.

Warner Bros allegedly knew Arkham Knight PC was a dud

Many fans are pointing the finger as Warner Bros, the publisher behind the series, for letting such an awful port reach stores in the first place rather than pushing back release.

It would have been bad enough if the publisher had no idea of atrocious state of the PC version of Arkham Knight before launch, but Warner Bros allegedly knew it had severe issues months in advance and decided to ship it anyway.

“I will say that it’s pretty rich for [Warner Bros] to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” a quality assurance tester for Arkham Knight told Kotaku. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”

If the console versions of Arkham Knight had been in such a dismal state, it is hard to imagine that Warner Bros would still have given the go ahead for release. Worse still, most reviews of the game give it a glowing recommendation, and the PC issues are a footnote at best in most major publications. Most of the major reviews, such as this one from CNET, were written before launch, and they don’t mention a single issue with the PC port.

Why? Because Warner Bros did not send out review copies of the PC version. It only sent out console versions, which makes it pretty clear that Warner Bros did indeed know there was a problem long before they were forced to yank the game from online stores.

But hey, as long as it’s not hurting console sales, right?

Image credit: Rocksteady Studios (c)