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Warner kill the Batman on PC… at least for a little while

If you have not been keeping up to date, Batman Arkham Knight is a shoddy mess on PC. Whilst a few gamers may be able to get it to work, albeit at 30FPS, many others are having a horrid time. A small number of the ever growing list of issues are as follows

  • Uses Denuvo DRM, which has hampered in-game performance for a number of people
  • Sometimes drops to a low of 6 FPS, even on high end setups
  • More random low frame rate drops when flying and/or driving around the city
  • Many low quality, blurry textures on 1000s of objects
  • Instant crashes to desktop when the game cannot ping a certain server
  • Other random crashes for reasons unknown to humans
  • Some crazy physics issues that cause the game to stutter randomly

All of this terribleness caused the game’s PC community to rebel, and march en masse to Steam to rate the game low in user reviews – resulting in a “Mostly Negative” tag getting applied to the game. In similar vein, reviews on the US arm of Amazon have dropped to 1 Star at the time of writing.

Warner Bros had this to say about the issues a few days ago

We are aware that there are performance issues for some users playing Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. WB Games is working diligently with our development teams, NVIDIA and AMD, to identify and fix the issues as quickly as possible.

However, the latest move in this unending saga is a bit more drastic than diligently working on fixes, as the publisher has seen fit to take the unprecedented step of suspending all sales of Arkham Knight on PC. This means that the game will not be made available to the public to purchase again until they believe all technical issues have been ironed out. If you already bought the game, and are annoyed as hell, they are also directing those affected to the fancy new Steam Refunds page. If you bought the game elsewhere, you can presumably head to that store and ask for a refund too.

The full statement is as follows

Dear Batman: Arkham Knight PC owners,

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. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.

Thank you to those players who have already given valuable feedback. We are continuously monitoring all threads posted in the Official Batman: Arkham Knight Community and Steam forums, as well as any issues logged with our Customer Support (support.wbgames.com). If you purchased your copy of the game and are not satisfied with your experience, then we ask for your patience while these issues are resolved. If desired, you can request a refund at help.steampowered.com (Steam refund policies can be found here: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds) or the retail location where you purchased the game.

The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we 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.

Iron Galaxy, makers of flash games such as DiveKick, were the studio who worked on the PC port of the game alongside Rocksteady and Warner Bros. They have not made a public statement on the game’s issues as of yet.