In a clear victory for quality control Warner Bros., a publisher who has become well disliked among the gaming community for their attitude toward customers, has pulled Batman: Arkham Knight from Steam following a barrage of negative reviews destroying the game for its horrendous performance and slew of missing graphical features, all of which seems to stem from the PC version being developed by external company Iron Galaxy Studios.

In a post on the official Arkham Knight forums Warner Bros. site they had this to say:

“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.”

IN a surprising move the post actively points people toward the Steam refund feature, before going on to say:

“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.”

Furthermore a Nividia representative told Videogamer.com today that they were helping fix the game, which was supposed to include a raft of Nvidia specific graphical features:

“We are working with WB Games and the development teams to address the performance issues of the PC version of Batman Arkham Knight. We have made our QA and engineering resources available and will provide updates when they are available.”

Hopefully this will benefit AMD users as well.

It could be entirely coincidental, but I can’t help but feel that Warner Bros. suddenly very apologetic and helpful attitude stems from Steam’s new refund policy which finally shifts some power back into the hands of the consumer, letting them tell companies that they’ve had enough and that they can take their b*llshit back. By having a refund policy of this manner it could potentially force publishers to release more polished products rather than continue with their “patch it later” strategy. Warner Bros. may be the first big company to feel the backlash of such a system, a system that will become more powerful as people realise what it enables them to do. Can you imagine if the Steam refund policy was around when Assassin’s Creed: Unity was launched?

in many ways it’s truly a shame to see this happen. Underneath the problems, to which the console version of the game can attest, Arkham Knight seems to be a great game, although I do actually have some serious gripes with it that I’ll be tackling in my review, so I guess I should get ready for some hate mail. It looks beautiful, and its a shame to see Rocksteady’s reputation tarnished by massive performance problems on PC, and Warner Bros. insulting DLC, pre-order and Season Pass plans.