The sad, slow fall of Arkham Knight’s non-console versions is rather like watching the man himself have his back broken, then be thrown off a dam into swirling waters below. Hopefully this is at least the final bone-crunching impact before we can put this all behind us. Warner Bros. announced through Steam today that they were officially cancelling the OSX and Linux ports of Arkham Knight, and that those who pre-ordered should seek a refund via Steam.
Let’s look forward to the best upcoming games, rather than the dark, sad past.
It’s something of a final nail in any hope that the promise of fully featured ports of the final Arkham game will come to fruition. Here’s the full post, made by wb.elder.pliny:
“We are very sorry to confirm that Batman: Arkham Knight will no longer be coming to Mac and Linux. If you have pre-ordered Batman: Arkham Knight for Mac or Linux, please apply for a refund via Steam.”
You can’t really argue with it from a business perspective – can’t imagine there was a whole lot of folks waiting for this, and Mac + Linux makes up less than 5% of Steam’s total userbase. That’s still a lot of people, but once you take off everyone without a PC capable of running it, those who are dual-booting, people who already have it on a console and all the rest, it’s a small audience.
But it’s more evidence of the publisher’s support for non-consoles dropping off completely. A couple of weeks back they announced that Mortal Kombat X’s next DLCand improved netcodewouldn’t be coming to PC, making the game effectively useless to own if you want to play multiplayer – people do that quite a bit with fighting games. The new Lego Star Wars is making it, but it’s also releasing on every other platform under the sun.
Seeing how they treat their next few big releases will tell us a lot about their future plans for mouse and keyboard users. I’d like them to keep publishing here, as I’ve enjoyed the majority of what they’ve released over the past few years – Shadow of Mordor, Arkham Knight, Mortal Kombat X and the Lego games are all great – but I’ve no time for buggy releases and poor performance.