NEWS | Week beginning June 22nd | Broken Batman, Steam Summer Sale Figures & Fallout Ingenuity

Good afternoon guys, and welcome back to another weekly news round-up! E3 is officially done and dusted, meaning everything should be returning to normal!

Better luck next time?

First up, we have a case of the 'Broken Batman'. On Tuesday, Batman: Arkham Knight was released on Playstation, Xbox and PC, however, the game is now only available on consoles. Why, you may ask? It's because the game is broken!
Users are reporting issues with frame-rate, where the game stutters, as well as audio glitches and sporadic freezes, making the game near impossible to play. Because of this, Warner, the publisher of Batman, have decided to completely pull the game from PC until all issues have been resolved. Warner have even instructed retailers, such as GAME, to not to sell Batman to customers no matter what. An employee working for GAME told news site Eurogamer that "We have the stock, but I'm not allowed to sell it to you".

I find the steps that Warner have taken to be quite admirable. Not only have they ordered retailers not to sell the game, as well as completely removing the game from online stores, they are also offering full refunds to users. Most publishers would merely push out an endless amount of patches in order to attempt to fix any issues. This shows to consumers that Warner are listening to their customers and are trying their utmost to fix the game.
Well done Warner, but next time, make sure your game works first before you sell it!

Next up, the Steam Summer Sale figures have been released, and, as always, they are quite remarkable!
For those of you who are not familiar with the Steam sales, they are sales that come around maybe once or twice a year, and almost ALL of the games on the Steam Store are discounted. The discounts can vary from a measly 10% to a massive 90%, depending on the popularity of the game, how new the game is, etc.

First up, the Top 5 Best Sellers of the Steam Summer Sale are:

1. Counter Strike: Global Offensive - 899,405
2. Total War: ATILLA - 488,827
3. Total War: Shogun 2 - 439,250
4. ARK: Survival Evolved - 431,456
5. Castle Crashers - 417,927

Did you pick up any deals?

It's no surprise that we're seeing games such as Counter Strike and Total War on this list. The games have thousands of registered players and users, and by the looks of it, those numbers will only increase.

Next, we have the Top 5 Titles with most revenue (conversions accurate June 28th) :

1. Total War: ATILLA - $14,733,246 - (£9,357,412)
2. ARK: Survival Evolved - $10,738,940 - (£6,820,539)
3. Counter Strike: Global Offensive - $6,736,543 - (£4,278,528)
4. The Witcher 3 - $5,101,299 - (£3,239,948)
5. Total War: Rome II Emperor Edition - $4,616,222 - (£2,931,865)

Again, these are impressive figures. This goes to show that people love a good sale!

Go to DSOGaming.com to view the rest of the figures on the Summer Sale!

Finally, one Fallout fan has used a bit of imagination when pre-ordering his copy of Fallout 4. Instead of paying with real money, a dedicated fan has decided to instead pay with over 2240 bottlecaps!

2240 bottlecaps in all their
glory!

The fan, known as Seth, said the 2240 bottlecaps were "everything I've been able been able to save since I played Fallout 3 for the first time". Seth later recieved an email from Matt Grandstaff, Bethesda's Global Community Lead, with a photo of the opened box full of bottlecaps, captioned with a promise that he'd get a copy of the game in November because "he's the first person to do this" implying that he's going to be the only person who will be able to pull this stunt off.

It was a nice idea from Seth, he's used his imagination to pull on the heartstrings of the Fallout devs, and it has clearly worked!

For those of you who do not know, Bottlecaps are the currency of choice in the Fallout universe.

So that's it for this week folks! What news story interested you this week? Have you been affected by Broken Batman? Did you pick up any deals in this years Steam Summer Sale? Have you pre-ordered a copy of Fallout 4 yet? Let me know in the comments below!

Thanks for reading!

Connor :)