They will be offering full refunds through steam until the end of the year because there are issues they cannot fix. For all you PC folks still holding out I guess it's time to buy the console version.

Until the end of 2015, we will be offering a full refund on Batman: Arkham Knight PC, regardless of how long you have played the product. You can also return the Season Pass along with the main game (but not separately). For those of you that hold onto the game, we are going to continue to address the issues that we can fix and talk to you about the issues that we cannot fix.

Destructoid article.

And WBIE steam statement about refunds with a note from Valve.

*GMG UPDATE*

As folks here in the thread have mentioned GMG has begun refunds on the game as well and have issued a statement on the matter.

Hi folks. Just a quick little update to let you know that in accordance with WBIE's statement on October 31st regarding Batman: Arkham Knight, we'll be honouring refunds on the title until the end of 2015.

Please refer to the original statement from WBIE for more information, and if you have any further questions about your order, please contact our support team

Source is GMG's FB page.

*NVIDIA PROMO UPDATE*

If you'd like to voice your displeasure directly to Nvidia they set up a thread specifically for the game a few months ago because of the game's issues on their official forums. There are more than a few folks asking about the code situation there so hopefully they respond at some point. I'll update if I see anything pop up.

Nvidia Geforce Batman AK thread.

In that thread though there is word from WB for the code folks. (credit HNKenshiro)

"If you received the game for free, due to a video card or other promotion, we do apologize that this does mean you are not eligible for a refund since you did not purchase the game. You will however continue to receive updates to the game, as well as free copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, Batman: Arkham City GOTY, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, free Team Fortress 2 items, and a free Challenge Map estimated to arrive over the next couple months as detailed here."

So you at least will be given the previous Batman games and stuff even if nothing else is done about from it NV.

Unfortunately ^ that bit seems to have been removed from the WB source link . Maybe this means they misspoke and folks will in fact NOTbe getting Batman AA/AC/Origins/etc if you got it from a promo code and they only meant for that to apply to retail buyers of the game.

Source

While there has been no official word from NV there have been documented cases of folks like Amazon/Newegg/BB/B&HPhoto/ect giving credit/giftcard/cash or other games as a replacement for AK. I would suggest contacting your reseller and hoping for the best.

Reddit PSA thread from a few months ago.

What a weird thing, ive had it this long i may as well keep it and see how long they actually support it. I cant beleive any compotent set of programmers couldnt fix the issues with this game, wb just doesnt want to give them time and resources. Their goal was dlc and nothing else

@oursin_360: Agreed. "issues we cannot fix" is some grade-A bullshit. What they actually mean is: "We got the money we wanted out of this thing, we aren't spending a dime on fixing this shit, go fuck yourselves"

In other words, this is one of the most unforgivable, disastrous releases of all time.

I say that as someone who played the game on PS4 and loved it.

@frostyryan said:

Nah, I don't think that's true. Don't get me wrong, I've had the PC version since launch and it's been nothing but terrible for me, but I think the reaction to it and Warner Bros' response is more a matter of shifting expectations and higher standards. There have been way worse PC ports put out by major publishers, it's just much harder to get away with it nowadays.

That's pretty fucking shitty.

Why can't this game be ported to PC properly? Like... what? Despite the ridiculous number of great-to-excellent ports we've seen over the past several years, you're going to tell me that this one has such major issues on the PC that you have to offer full refunds until the end of the year? That sounds like the results of a clusterfuck of incompetence and miscommunication. From who, I don't know, I don't pretend to know what goes on in game development, but someone or a group of someone's involved just doesn't know what they're doing.

If Sega can take a niche 2008 PS3 exclusive and port it 6 years later on a whim, certainly Warner fucking Brothers can properly port a product based on one of their most marketable properties.

I don't even know why I'm so mad, I like-not-love the series and I've already got Arkham Knight on the Xbox One, it's just the audacity that after all this time they're like "uh... yeah, we're not going to do this right after all".

Hottest Mess 2015. Hell, of the decade.

And this all seems crazy because the PS4 version played perfectly and looked damn fine.

This is what happens when you give a triple-A title to a Flash game developer for porting. O_____O

Seriously, though, I'm curious where the kink in the hose has been with all of this. Going to this kind of length is kind of crazy in this day and age of high-end publishers. Most of them just give you a "tough titty" kind of comment and move on *cough*BATTLEFIELD*cough*. However, for WB to go to this length...even after the shittiness of Origins, something seriously fucked up must've happened either in the original coding or the translation.

I'm going to assume that there will be some layoff posts on Twitter soon, as well as some form of Warner Bros. finger-pointing.

Does this mean people can buy Arkham Knight on Steam now, play through the entire game, and then get a full refund? What about the free copies of Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Arkham Origins, and Arkham Origins Blackgate?

Also, just wait until the system requirements for the next WB PC game are announced. Minimum i7-6700k, 64 GB DDR4, 2x 980 Ti in SLI, PCIE SSD. Just you watch. And the game will be limited to 1080p and 30 FPS.

If you interpret their statement literally, it does sound like anyone would be able to get a full refund. That's beyond crazy if it's actually true. Is this PC port really such a disaster that everyone involved would prefer to totally wash their hands of it? Clearly they invested a lot since the original launch in trying to get it to a point where it's at least ok, so it's insane that they would be willing to just jettison the product of all that time and money.

What a shitshow. This is a similar situation to how WB Montreal explicitly stated that instead of fixing the bugs in Origins they continued to work on DLC instead.

I wouldn't be so hasty to throw the book at WB for not putting the effort in to fix it. They've been crunching that for the last four months and bug fixing on a product with a lot of bugs must feel like a fruitless task, at times.

Weren't Mordor and Mad Max really good ports?

I may as well keep it now. Downloaded the game again after it was relaunched on Steam and it performed better but it seems that's partly because I've got a GPU now (980ti as opposed to a 780 when I originally bought the game) that can brute-force the awful port and give me acceptable framerates.

Still can't hold 60 all the time, mind.

What a strange turn of events. WB not caring about fixing or supporting their games has been established before but why on earth would they go through this circus and at the end offer even more refounds?

Also i got the game through my nVidiacard but i bought the season pass. Doesnt seem to be a way for me to refound which is sour becouse the seasonpass really under delivered but im happy with the game.

@dudeglove: I think people can still remember with $60 back in their pocket.

Oh man, I wish I would've bought the pc-version instead (and have it work back then, obvs). Could've spent that refund on Fallout 4 now.

Thought I might get this game on sale during black Friday, but I'm not so sure anymore.

They can't really expect people to believe it right? I mean, 'issues we couldn't fix'? DIDN'T YOU MAKE THE GAME???

Of course you can fix it, you just don't want to. You've got your money's worth on consoles and don't feel the need to invest in making it work on PCs. Which isn't a crime in of itself.

But for the love of God, if you don't want to make the PC version playable, don't release it. The fact that you decided to ship a clearly broken game with the hope that 5% of people will be able to play it is just such a slap on the face.

How did this happen? How can a major release be so broken?

I'm usually pretty reticent about this stuff but this honestly seems like a new level of cruddy. And the ps4/xbone basically being glorified lower level pcs makes it especially odd. I feel like that might be reductive and it's a lot more complicated that that.

I like iron galaxy obviously and hope they somehow don't get hit hard by this but at the same time maybe you reap what you sow? Of course it possibly (most likely) doesn't have much to do with them when all's said and done.

Remember when they initially had huge framerate issues when demoing the game? Hmmmm...

I really don't understand the "but not separately" bit.

If someone thinks the game is junk, barely functional, and has no interest in the DLC that clearly cannot be made to actually work properly on the PC, why can't they just return that Season Pass? Why doesn't WB want to keep whatever money that person paid for the base game? Why are they incentivising that person to get whatever joy they can get out of the game for the next two months and then return it all for a 100% refund.

I just can't see the business case for the restriction.

x86 Architecture.

As @ripelivejam says, it must be more complicated than that. But this does seem fairly crazy for them to outright say already that there are bugs they will never be able to fix. If they know that for complete certain then offering refunds does seem like the right move.

But then what happens at the end of the year? Do they put a note on the Steam page with 'Warning: Unfixable bugs inside?'. This whole thing is crazy. Maybe they will increase the minimum spec listing, because people seem to brute forcing some of the issues away.

This just confirms hottest mess of 2015. That is unless AC: Syndicate manages to be really bad but the sting felt from Batman has been much longer even if it turns out to be a bad PC port again.

@turtlebird95: mordor was a terrific port, but that was due to being made in house by monolith.

I got the game through Green Man Gaming so I'm pretty much fucked I guess, nice.

Could be that WB decided that it wasn't worth the hassle to continue paying for their hired help to keep cranking out patches and fixes. I can't remember if Rocksteady took over the PC port internally after the colossal, calamitous fuckup that was the PC release, but I remember reading somewhere that they did. If that's the case then I can see why WB is washing their hands of the whole deal. As a business decision it's actually pretty sound. You want your rockstar studio making the next hit game, not slaving away fixing a product that is DOA.

That being said I wonder what an "unfixable issue" is. Is it user hardware related or is there just something in Unreal 3 that is causing it to spaz out on PCs?

@shivoa: I took it to mean they wanted one refund transaction and didn't want folks refunding just the season pass then playing the game to later refund before years end. Though if one was more cynical they could take it to mean screwing season pass only folks who got the base game from Nvidia code so they're ineligible for the refunds. Though I'm sure it's the former.

This is not a good solution for me, as I got my copy of the game with my video card, therefore making me unqualified (?) for a refund. You could make the argument that since I didn't actually pay for the game, it shouldn't matter, but I'm still stuck with a shitty version of one of WB's games, which they should be responsible for. I can't even benefit from the free Arkham games because I HAVE THEM ALL ALREADY. Give me a choice of free games I don't actually own, dammit.

Let's not forget that this is only the PC release. The console version still played well.

@wemibelec90: So... you're upset that you can't get free money?

Wow...well glad I wasn't holding out to play this one.

Since I didn't have much issue at launch with my 980 other than having to lock it to 30 I'm going to try it out with the new patch to see if I can play at 60 and then play the game again because I still enjoyed it and then request a refund. Win/win!

I mean, I understand what could have gone wrong. I may not be a programmer, but I have worked on long term translation projects before. There have been times where, halfway through the project, I just step back and realize that the whole thing is just an unintelligible mess. At that point your only options are to scrap the entire thing and start over, or just abandoned it and say to the commissioner "Sorry bro, this is way outside what I can do." And give them their money back. So I get it, and I can't even begin to imagine what hell was unleashed.

The game had hitching for me at launch, but it was certainly playable. I've already beaten it three times. This latest update has it running perfectly on my 970 and modest 2600K CPU, albeit with the ridiculously recommended 12GB of RAM, so I'm pretty content with it now. Such a shitty situation and the idea of 'unfixable bugs' is insane, I wish it wasn't such a black mark on one of my top 5 games of the year. I was kind of hoping to get the season pass content for free though.

@oldirtybearon: Word.

@wemibelec90: Honestly during the whole batman debacle they were allowing folks to contact the resellers or manufacturer directly (forget which one) and swap the keys for an MGSV code. I would say if you have any gripe it's with them and not really with WB as they can't really refund you money you never spent on their game. Contact your reseller/manufacturer (Asus/msi/evga/ect) and see what they say.

What a shitshow.

I wonder, i did the same thing but they should honor it since WB announced it themselves. I know the reasoning before was "the game is fully functional now" but since WB admits that it's not they should honor the refund to keep customers happy.

Are there still people here claiming that it isn't actually broken? I saw a lot of that before, with people claiming it was just PC gamers crying that there was no 60fps option etc.

That's not to say it was broken for everyone, but that doesn't make the many instances of this game being broken a piece of fiction cooked up in the minds of PC gamers.

@alistercat: The problems are very real and serious. It's just that it seems like you can bruteforce your way past them if your PC is strong enough.

At launch I could run it maxed out at 60 on my i7/980 but the problem I had is that the frames would drop to single digits for a split second and occur repeatedly at random so I locked it to 30 and finished the game no problem

@colourful_hippie: I'm not disputing it, I bought the game the day it was out and had similar issues. Got a full refund and bought the PS4 version. I just couldn't believe how many people were saying that the issues weren't real. I have close friends who ran it fine even on similar setups but it was still broken for me on an i7 and 970.

What a shitshow. As someone who enjoyed the game (with a few caveats), I feel bad for my PC-bound peers.

Just got a response from GMG Customer Service:

"Hi,

Thank you for your ticket.

Warner Brothers have released a patch on the 3rd September which has fixed the majority of the gameplay issues customers were facing. As this game is now considered in a playable state, we are no longer honouring refund requests for this title as previously announced in our blog post.

To find more information on this patch and the changes that have been made, you can navigate to this announcement here.

We are aware of the recent posts regarding refunds of this title on Steam so we have placed your request on hold whilst we investigate this further. Rest assured that we are treating your request with the utmost priority.

Kind regards,

Clay

Green Man Gaming & Playfire

Customer Service"

We're fucked. They're basically saying that the game is playable while the actual publisher of said game says it isn't. lol?

@pilgore: You're probably not getting a refund, but they are investigating further so there's still a chance. The decision to honor more refunds is probably something that WB themselves would need to work with GMG to handle. I'm not sure GMG would have any reason to do it on their own.

@dave_tacitus: I'm basically in the same boat. I upgraded from SLI 680s to a Fury, and I can essentially brute force the thing now. Not holding 60 @ 1440p all the time, but at least it doesn't stutter constantly for me anymore.

I guess I can understand people being bitter after being offered a full fucking refund (from steam). They wanted to play the game. I was becoming more incredulous until that that occurred to me. And being pc gamers, not everyone owns a console.

I myself bought a PS4, and have the game on that. I might give it another try, being 60.00 and all.

To be honest, I have to read what @junkboy0 references, because I am wondering about disk and other digital sources.

By investigating my guess is that they mean they're waiting for more refund requests to reach a threshold that they can no longer ignore

Lang and the rest of IG should stick to fighting games. Between this debacle and that awful Vita borderlands 2 port complex games don't seem like their strong suit