Busted PC Batman Proves Pre-Ordering is Questionable

Maybe you're a big Batman fan.  Maybe you excitedly pre-ordered Batman:  Arkham Knight and anxiously waited to play it the first moment it was available.  If you were one of those people you probably had your dreams crushed by a buggy and unplayable PC port.  /sigh, yet another sad story of buggy releases that make you want to hurl your keyboard across the room.  Sadly this seems to happen all too often and as a consumer this can be very frustrating.  Probably the most interesting part of this whole debacle is that rather than promising to fix the bugs the publisher actually pulled the PC version of the game.  A game that was on sale a few days ago is now completely gone (I saw it on Steam for the brief time it was available).  One of the publishers for the game also decided to offer refunds because of the massive backlash from angry gamers.

There's currently a lot of debate about whether this was the right move.  It does bring up a lot of issues that seem to plague the cross-species nature of games.  If it's so buggy that it's completely unplayable....why release it in the first place?  As a gamer I would much rather wait and have a playable game than have a disaster glaring at me from my gaming library.  Is it that important that the console versions and the PC versions come out at exactly the same time?  Console versions always seem to get precedence anyway, so why push it?  I'm not sure the damage to the reputation of a brand is really worth it.

This also serves as a great reminder about why you should pre-order with caution.  I will be the first to admit that when I see a game I want to play that mashing that pre-order button feels really good.  Unfortunately with situations like this one it can turn out to be more "buyer beware" than hours of gaming fun.

The developers have promised to get the game into a playable state as soon as possible.  Maybe pulling the game is the right decision.  Hopefully this will give them time to really work out all the bugs and give Batman fans the game that they deserve.  And who knows...maybe in the future the PC versions of some games might get more attention.  It would be nice if they offered some sort of amends to people who pre-ordered and then weren't able to play.  A nice DLC pass or some unique in-game item....but I really doubt it.