Arkham Knight and the sad state of video game QA

To say the launch of Arkham Knight on the PC was a disaster would be an understatement. Fans of the Batman were met with terrible performance even on high performance systems. Another day, another sloppy port of a console game.

Except this time was different. Gamers got upset, and both Warner Bros. and Rocksteady actually listened to their concerns. Just a few days after being bombarded with bad reviews, the game was pulled from store shelves.

It’s an important victory for the often abused PC gaming community.

Up until recently, big publishers were able to pinch off a turd of a game and sell it to an unsuspecting public. If you happened to buy it, you were screwed. Copyright provisions limited the returning of open software boxes to direct exchanges only.

Of course those rules no longer apply in the digital age, where stores control licenses. A few weeks back, Steam finally instituted a refund policy. If you didn’t like the game, you can return it within a set time period, no questions asked.

When you pay $60 or more for a game, there’s a reasonable expectation that it should work. It shouldn’t matter if you purchase it right at launch or months later. Yet as we’ve seen over the past year, just about every major developer has failed to live up to that expectation.

For the first time in gaming history, these big studios can actually lose money if they decide to pull a fast one. That’s precisely why Warner Bros. gave in.

Yet while the PC Master Race finally has an option to fight back, their console brothers still don’t.

The lax attitude towards quality control is perhaps single biggest issue facing the video game industry right now.

So how does it happen? How can games with multi-million dollar budgets from multi-billion dollar companies be so bad?

It’s easy to blame the developers but it’s really the publishers who are at fault. Gamers want bigger games, and developers are being asked to deliver those within a very strict release calendar. Marketing’s needs take precedent over everything else. 

Most of a game’s money is made in the few weeks immediately after launch. Delays can derail the hype train, and ensure a lukewarm reception later down the road. So publishers are opting to just shove it out the door anyway, regardless of the state it’s in.

This tactic is a lot easier to pull off with established franchises, as a lot of sales are based on brand recognition alone. Think of the clueless parents who buying for their kids. There’s a lot more of them than there are of us.

Making matters worse are the removal of patch size limits from current generation consoles. Nowadays, you’ll pop in a game and have to download a multi-gigabyte update before you can even think about playing it.

Hardware companies like Microsoft and Sony are supposed to act as gatekeepers to prevent these shenanigans from happening. However, as we saw with the Master Chief Collection and Drive Club, they’re not above stooping to these same tactics.

Obviously the system is broken. The solution comes from following Steam’s lead and allowing refunds across all platforms. This is where gamers need to get vocal. Otherwise the trash is just going to keep on coming.

Photo by Ben Husmann via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons