In a short post on steam yesterday, a Warner Bros. representative wrote a blunt message in the game’s Steam forums indicating that users who were hoping to play Arkham Knight on SteamOS were out of luck.
“We are very sorry to confirm that Batman: Arkham Knight will no longer be coming to Mac and Linux,” the forum post reads. “If you have pre-ordered Batman: Arkham Knight for Mac or Linux, please apply for a refund via Steam.”
This is obviously a disappointment, but it’s a move that was fairly easy to see coming. Last year the Mac and Linux ports of Arkham Knight, developed by Feral Interactive, were delayed to spring 2016. Feral said at the time that this was to give the game “extra development time needed to ensure good performance and wide-ranging support for OS X, Linux and SteamOS.”
In a fitting move, this came on the same day that the PC port of the game, pulled months prior, returned to Steam. When it originally launched, the game was buggy to the point of being unplayable for many users. Even after the game returned, bugs still lingered.
In December, the final piece of downloadable content for Arkham Knight was released. With the content for the game effectively finished, it could be that Warner Bros. made the decision that devoting more resources to the game wouldn’t be worth the extra revenue it would generate from being available on more platforms.
Feral was responsible for Mac ports of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, so the company was certainly used to this type of work. Of course, given the state of Arkham Knight on the PC, porting work could have been far more difficult.
