It's not been a great week for Warner Brothers Interactive and Rocksteady. The freshly re-released PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight was once again made available for purchase on the Steam Store earlier this week after Warner Brothers Interactive released the October update that was supposed to fix the ridiculous amount of technical problems it had at launch. Players were quick to note that the new patch only enabled addon content, with the patch notes (which was bereft of any useful notes) saying that Windows 10 users were recommended to have at least 12 GB of RAM to avoid the paging issues that could make the game crash after extended periods of playtime. Even though the patch was more than 2 gb in size, a majority of customers have reported no increase in performance whatsoever, leaving you to wonder what the patch actually fixed. More on the patch here.

In a response to this, people took to the Steam store page of the game in droves to complain about the state of the game. At the time of writing this, the amount of negative reviews has reached 10.000 negative reviews, with around 8000 positive reviews. According to the Steamspy page for the game, over 400.000 people have bought the game. If the Steam reviews are anything to go by, this could mean that there is a silent majority within those 400k that are also experiencing technical issues. If you've held off on buying the game until the October patch, then maybe it'll be better to hold off a bit longer.

Since the re-release there has been, according to steam spy, an almost 3 to 1 ratio in negative to positive new reviews, with the rating score dropping from 49% to 46% during this period by user reviews, as well as passing the 10k negative review mark. In comparison, even the notorious Assassin's Creed Unity has only 4200 negative reviews, and a user rating of 49%. Interestingly, the relaunch, while propelling Batman: Arkham Knight temporarily back onto steam top sellers, has not as of yet significantly moved the ownership numbers, staying within the margin of error that occurs with Steamspy's datamining.

Quick Take

In all my years as a gamer I don't think I've ever seen such a broken game with this amount of backlash. Warner Brothers had 4 months to fix their horribly broken game, and still people are reporting performance issues all across the board. Personally, I'm glad I held off on buying the game when I first heard about the sorry state of it at launch. It takes talent to screw something up this badly.