In almost every case, critics firmly call out bugs and performance issues in their reviews, and that's how it should be. Our policy has been that, unless a game has radically different experiences on different platforms, it should be presented as a single product. We still believe in the single-score approach. We revisited our designs, questioning if it was the right decision to aggregate all platforms into a single score. The OpenCritic team discussed this moment intensely behind the scenes. A few days after its release, Warner Brothers issued an apology and suspended all sales of the PC version. While the game performed well and was received well on consoles, the PC release had so many problems that many gamers considered it unplayable. In 2015, prior to the launch of OpenCritic, the development team watched the PC release of Batman: Arkham Knight. It was deceptive, selfish, and exploitative. They did it knowing that what they were doing was wrong. It's a small, though typically inconsequential blindspot in how publications connect with gamers. Extremely large publications, like IGN or GameSpot, are typically afforded the chance to review all platforms and call out any major differences between them. Most of the review roundups published by individual publications make no reference to the platform reviewed. Consumers have come to expect that most games will be fairly reviewed across all platforms, and in our experience, most publishers respect that expectation. Most games, especially AAA games, usually don't have significant disparities in the experience between same-gen hardware. They did it knowing that most online communities don't discuss the platforms behind the review. Digital retailers have tight controls on their return policies, with many (notably, some consoles) not offering returns at all. Physical retailers generally require that games be unopened in order to be returned. They did it knowing that, to this day, it is still challenging for consumers to return a video game. Finally, Metacritic generally does not accept edited or updated review scores. Second reviews also typically come after a game's launch, when many consumers have already decided whether or not to buy a game, and thus don't attract the same readership. Second reviews won't rank high on news aggregators, such as Google News or Apple News, because it's a topic that's been covered by them before. The second review creates confusion with their audience in addition to dampening SEO and Google keyword rankings. They did it knowing that many publications generally can't re-review games. They knew that, if the console version were to be reviewed, it would receive negative reviews due to its performance issues and hurt the game's launch day sales. They did this knowing that the visual bugs that you would see in a video were jarring enough to make many question their preorder. They did this knowing that their game had severe performance issues on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, which were its target launch consoles given they published its debut trailer in 2013 and the game's initial April 2020 launch date. They allowed no one to discuss or review the game on the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 consoles. In this case, they issued PC review copies to publications with high-end PCs and required that they not show any of their own gameplay recordings.
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