What Will Come of It?

There are a lot of things I could comment on this week (missed posting last week because I was AFK for much of it) but the single topic I want to mention is the PC release of Batman Arkham Knight.
I do not think it is an overestimation to say that Arkham Knight was one of the more anticipated titles for this year, since it is a Batman game, of the Rocksteady's Arkham franchise, and it is rumored to receive a DX12 update in the future (I think that's still just rumor). When it finally launched though, a large portion of the gaming community, namely the PC segment, got, well, screwed off. Why mince words here? It's a terrible launch and from what I've read and seen (do not have a copy myself) it likely should not have released in this state. WBIE agrees with that too, since it has pulled the game from Steam, pending significant patching. So, how has this come to be, what is happening now, and what might happen in the future?
Obviously I can only guess at any of these answers, but this is what makes sense to me. This was allowed to happen because many in the industry consider console games to be more important, for a host of reasons. Some of them I reject as being silly, but that is unimportant. What matters in this situation is that it was obviously decided that the console versions are more important, or else Rocksteady would have handled the PC version directly, instead of a separate company. Hopefully this is something that will change in the future, and I expect it will at least at WBIE, to avoid this from happening again. (Look at Ubisoft. After its several poor launches last year, culminating in Unity, it appears they have taken on a more transparent approach to their development, or at least I do not remember there being so many betas from them previously.)

Right now chances are people at WBIE are scrambling not only to fix the issues, but also to figure how to spin everything to a positive, and prevent it from happening again. That spin I suspect will come in the form of some offering, like everyone getting a copy of the season pass, or something. That would be a huge amount of lost revenue for them, but then they are losing money every day it is not on sale and people are left to forget the game and remember the problems. I don't know what strategy they may adopt to avoid this in the future, but it will likely include more internal testing, and perhaps more involvement with the primary developer, concerning all ports.
The future is definitely the most interesting aspect of this episode. Could this begin a trend away from outsourced PC ports? I can only hope, but I doubt it will be that significant. More likely I think it will be a greater awareness by the industry that they cannot neglect the PC version and PC gamers, like appears to have happened here. If when it re-releases, enough people purchase it, to show there is an interest in the fully functional game, then I think there is a greater chance of an improved future, but then, who is going to trust them?
Actually, probably most people will trust them. After all, Batman Arkham Asylum, the first game in the franchise, is the one with 'gimped' graphics, or do people not remember that incident? At the time, anti-aliasing was not present in the game engine used (either UE3 or UE2, I do not remember which). To add the feature, a special layer had to be added to the game to support it, which NVIDIA helped with, and when the game launched, only NVIDIA cards could enable MSAA. Before long though, someone discovered that if you edited the name of an ATI GPU, removing ATI and Radeon from the name, the option was available and it ran without issue. Non-NVIDIA GPUs were actually completely capable of MSAA but had been blacklisted, as opposed to the NVIDIA GPUs being whitelisted. Oh, it led to such an uproar, as an obvious example of unfair bias towards one manufacturer, which had also been directly involved in development. Now, most people I think do not remember it, which is why I think most people will not remember the Arkham Knight issues in the future either. The question for WBIE and Rocksteady, is when will enough people forget?