I’m not entirely surprised by this, but there is a possibility that Warner Bros knew about the problems with the PC port of Arkham Knight and decided to release it anyway.
“I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” said one quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”
I think the new Steam refund policy was a crucial role in this incident. I don’t think WB expected a mass volume of people demanding to get their money back for such a poorly ported game, hence they pulled it from everywhere. Steam is the biggest distribution service for PC games, and to have your game be the most refunded is a pretty bad mark against you.
Now if they could just fix the refund system so that small indies don’t get screwed by people who buy their small games just to finish them in half an hour and ask for a refund… But that’s another issue.