There were various interesting events in gaming in 2015, some positive, some not so much – but perhaps the biggest fiasco of them all was the way the launch of “Batman: Arkham Knight” was handled, as the game came out to multiple issues on the PC and put the publisher in a very difficult situation. In the end they had to resort to pulling the game out of the market until they could address its problems, and that took them quite a while too.
People are still talking about the incident, and even though the title was eventually fixed and brought to a playable state, gamers will likely remember what happened for a long time. It shook people’s trust in the publisher quite a bit, and also made many gamers wary of newly released titles, which is arguably a healthy attitude to have as a consumer in the gaming industry in the first place. If another game is released in the franchise, people will most likely be a lot more skeptical of it until they are sure that it actually works properly, and no amount of marketing will be able to build up faith in the product.
How bad was the situation though? While the game worked quite well on consoles, its PC version was plagued by multiple issues, with many players describing it as literally unplayable. Between the various performance problems and crashes, the graphical inconsistencies and even gameplay issues, many agreed that this game should have never left the studio in the first place, and it was unreasonable to believe that people would be fine with such an offer at all.
Some gamers still saw it as a commendable move that the studio decided to completely pull the game from the shelves until the issues were fixed, although it was also an obvious PR move. After all, continuing to sell the game in this state could have only hurt them as people were becoming very aggressive with the idea of refunds, and even minor talks of a class-action lawsuit could be seen on some gaming forums.
For many interested in the industry from up close, this was quite peculiar to observe. It wasn’t the first time that a company had released a game in a subpar condition, but this was one of the biggest backlashes we’ve seen on the market so far, and it was also probably justified as the launch itself was one of the messiest the industry had seen. There was little justification for this kind of release, and many gamers were wondering if the company had actually tested the game in advance before bringing it out to the market.
It’s completely standard procedure to test games thoroughly before releasing them, especially for the PC which can sometimes be a bit pretentious with different hardware configurations, Windows editions and driver versions. It can often be a mess to get a game working equally well for all gamers, but this is still no excuse for swinging to the other extreme.
It’s also interesting to note that the issue left many gamers with a permanent distrust towards this specific title, and even after its problems were addressed there was still strong reluctance to actually buy the game. Revised reviews came out that described the game as mostly fixed, and yet people didn’t want to trust it at all anymore. It’s not clear if this attitude will prevail in the long run, but if it does, Warner Bros. could find themselves in some trouble.