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Old 10-19-2011, 11:25 PM   #1
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http://www.1up.com/news/batman-arkha...es-looked-into

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As if online passes and retailer exclusives didn't already upset enough gamers on their own, Batman: Arkham City buyers are reporting problems with the codes that should have been included with the game, in particular those to unlock the Catwoman DLC.

There are a number of issues that have been encountered: some are missing the voucher that should have the Catwoman code on it, others have the voucher but no code was printed on it, and others received multiple vouchers.

There are numerous threads on these subjects on the official Arkham City forums in between messages about trading the many different pre-order/retailer-exclusive outfits and bonuses. There have been issues with those, too; codes for the Joker Challenge Map DLC, for example, have been reported missing, but it's the Catwoman issues that seem to be the most abundant, most likely because that's something that should have been included with every new copy of the game no matter where it was purchased or pre-ordered.

Warner Bros. and Rocksteady know about the issues -- on the game's official Twitter account, a tweet reads, "We are aware that some people did not receive the Catwoman code in their game." It also states, "You will get to play as the sexy thief, stay tuned for update[s]." A subsequent tweet adds, "We are looking into Catwoman dlc problems so please stay tuned."

Batman: Arkham City Catwoman missing code

The Catwoman code allows players to assume the role of Catwoman at points throughout the game. It alters the beginning of the game and has the potential to add a lot to the experience. Restricting it behind a one-time-use code is unfortunate for those who borrow the game or buy it used (and therefore have to spend $10 if they want to play as Catwoman -- unless they buy it at GameStop), but now that players are missing out on part of the experience because of a gaffe like this, their outrage is all the more understandable.

Driver: San Francisco encountered a similar problem after Ubisoft brought back the online pass model for console versions of the game. When it was released, codes were missing or incomplete so Ubisoft did the right thing and dropped the requirement altogether.

Other games' online passes have caused issues as well, although in some cases they weren't the fault of the publisher. Both Mortal Kombat and Dirt 3 were released with online passes earlier this year. In the case of the PS3 versions, the PlayStation Store remained inaccessible for a period even after PSN came back online following its extended downtime. Without a way to redeem each game's online pass, there was no way to play either online. Warner Bros. temporarily dropped the requirement, allowing all Mortal Kombat owners to play online until online passes could be redeemed. Codemasters, on the other hand, said such a solution wasn't technically possible, forcing Dirt 3 owners to wait for the Store to return before getting online.

It's hard to say with any certainty, but the tweet about getting to play at Catwoman could be interpreted as meaning the Catwoman DLC will be released for free, a solution many would appreciate. Alternatively it could be that the logistics of distributing new codes to those who were affected is being worked out, though it's anyone's guess how it would determine who is telling the truth about not receiving a working code.
But don't worry kids, in this age of digital revolution getting your missing codes is an easy, hassle-free process!

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A dated proof of purchase (receipt, invoice) showing the purchase of a NEW copy of the game (not a rented or used copy, nor a copy purchased from eBay)
Your gamertag for Xbox Live, or your profile for the PSN
Your email address
A scan or digital picture of the package and game disc(s)
A scan or digital picture of the code sheet (both sides).
Apparently nobody at Rocksteady or WB thought "hey, maybe this shit is getting out of hand" when people had to write up a fucking preorder bonus guide. I'd have been pissed off at this if 1)Arkham City was a day-one purchase for me and 2)I hadn't already gotten it as a free game on the PC for buying a new video card, but because I'll be getting the PC version by the time the shit finally settles for console players I can sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

But whatever, this is the generation that brought us developers complaining about "how used games show up on the shelf a week after the game is out" with absolutely no irony or self-reflection involved. Nothing to do but punch in 25-digit passcodes on control pads until heads are removed from asses, I suppose.
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Last edited by Blastoise; 10-19-2011 at 11:39 PM.
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Old 10-20-2011, 12:36 AM   #2
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Ya when I heard about all the dlc being planned for this game I decided to wait for the GOTY edition. Then this Catwoman stuff comes along and I decide to never purchase nor play this game. Looks like that was a good decision! Other stupid things about this release~

- No instruction book. AA had an 18 page one, not much but still something.
- Players are having issue with "corrupted" dlc and getting booted out of the game because of it.
- "We're large companies that have gone green by phasing out instruction books and cutting giant holes out of game cases! Aren't we great?" Meanwhile instead of instruction books, cases are filled with dlc codes (which mind you are more likely to get thrown away than the books). Or in this releases case, pieces of paper with no codes! How very enviro-friendly!
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Old 10-20-2011, 12:40 AM   #3
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Brave new world indeed. Have been outside of the gaming mainstream for quite a while now -- a little over four years -- but from what I understand, Microsoft and Sony, not to mention Gabe Newell Valve, have been pushing gamers in the direction of having games not be owned property but rather licenses -- licenses which can and do in fact expire -- by which the gamer is given permission to play the game. In other words, they've been trying to push us in a direction where:

1) You can no longer buy physical game media. You -have- to get it via a direct download. If you don't like it, tough.

2) The download you get will be configured to Hell and back in ways that'll drive you crazy. Like ...
a) it requires a semi-constant Internet connection because it's constantly pinging the mother ship to make sure you're playing the game legally
b) it'll self-destruct (or just quit working) X many days after purchase.

3) When the game quits working, or when you lose your copy, you have to pay a renewal fee to basically (as the game companies see it) "renew your license." That's right: you're renewing your license to play this game.

I really don't care for any of this. I'm okay with the legal argument that we don't own games but rather we own the right to play the games when we pay $50 and get a game cartridge. That's fine. I understand. That's meant to basically say "$50 did not buy you the right to modify the code and do with it what you will." I mean, I'm not completely fine with it, but fuck it, the OpenSource vs. corporate war isn't my fight. But that $50 I spent for the right to play the game? That had damn well better be a right to play the game for life. Because what I'm not fine with is the notion that when I paid $50 for, say, Dynasty Warriors 7 that my copy of the game would quit working after 2 years and that after those 2 years if I want to keep playing I'll need to fork over an additional $30. W-what? Even if I want to play offline? Are you fucking kidding me? But it seems like that's the direction we're headed in. And I don't like it one bit. Imagine if they did this to you with your books. Imagine if some devil warped into your room every night and incinerated all the books on your bookshelf that were exactly two years old or older and told you, "Want to read these again? Better go and buy 'em again." Ridiculous.

The cool news? The 1990s and 2000s were very kind to us. Worst case scenario: we still have two decades' worth of solid games to go back and re-play over the next twenty years.

Last edited by Talon87; 10-20-2011 at 12:42 AM.
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Old 10-20-2011, 12:44 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by Blastoise View Post
Apparently nobody at Rocksteady or WB thought "hey, maybe this shit is getting out of hand".
What's funny is the article basically told me the code claim requirements before I even read them. The narrative made no secret of the stupidity it was documenting.

I'm curious of what the big deal is, though. I understand console games are upwards of 30% more expensive than their PC counter-parts, but this Batman: Arkham City looks like the same seasonal, big movie tie-in games that brought us Harry Potter: The Game and Enter the Matrix.

Yeah, I can understand guys feeling gypped for not getting their red-blooded American male daily intake of bouncing CGI breasts, but if it's a movie based game, big deal is what? I have no idea how I'm supposed to feel about this - is it like opening a DOS game in the 1990's and not getting a decoder wheel to bypass the copyright protection, or losing out on the manual that gives flavour text/background info?

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Imagine if they did this to you with your books. Imagine if some devil warped into your room every night and incinerated all the books on your bookshelf that were exactly two years old or older and told you, "Want to read these again? Better go and buy 'em again." Ridiculous.
https://kindle.amazon.com/
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Last edited by Doppleganger; 10-20-2011 at 12:47 AM.
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Old 10-20-2011, 01:23 AM   #5
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See, I don't understand why people play that game though, Doppel. Who in their right mind would rather have an e-Book for 2 years when you could have a physical book for-e-ver? Maybe not "forever" forever -- drop it in the toilet, spill coffee on it, lose it, lots of things could happen which might take it out of your possession -- but you'd still be more likely to have that book in 2 years' time than you would a time-limited e-Book.

I'm sure people will find, have found, ways to crack those kinds of limiters already. But that's not really the point. We shouldn't have to be hacking our games or cracking our e-readers in order to enjoy the same basic privileges of ownership we've known for the last 30 years (games) to 500+ years (books, newspapers, and other manuscripts).
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Old 10-20-2011, 03:32 AM   #6
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See, I don't understand why people play that game though, Doppel. Who in their right mind would rather have an e-Book for 2 years when you could have a physical book for-e-ver? Maybe not "forever" forever -- drop it in the toilet, spill coffee on it, lose it, lots of things could happen which might take it out of your possession -- but you'd still be more likely to have that book in 2 years' time than you would a time-limited e-Book.
College kids.

When you combine 1) poor and 2) wannabe tech-savvy you get Kindle's main target. College kids can expect to spend a significant portion of their money on text-books, many of which they don't hope to keep or want to sell back after a time. Rather than sell back the hard-copies, they just buy a digital license. If it has an expiration date, it becomes all the more cheaper.

Once people get accustomed to that, then Amazon has its dependents by the balls.

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Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
I'm sure people will find, have found, ways to crack those kinds of limiters already. But that's not really the point. We shouldn't have to be hacking our games or cracking our e-readers in order to enjoy the same basic privileges of ownership we've known for the last 30 years (games) to 500+ years (books, newspapers, and other manuscripts).
I don't like my privileges reduced either, but I'd sort of accepted it because I believed in hackers being able to illegally circumnavigate stuff if they wanted to.

But I don't hear stories of people playing illegally on Steam, so now I'm starting to worry.
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Old 10-20-2011, 01:07 PM   #7
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This is not a movie game.
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Old 10-20-2011, 04:55 PM   #8
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This is not a movie game.
But Batman Year 1 came out on the same day as this game released! That kinda makes it a movie tie-in if ya ask me! An no it doesn't gotta share the same story or anything to be considered a tie-in.
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Old 10-20-2011, 05:56 PM   #9
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Saying Batman is a tie-in to Batman. Great connection.

Batman Year One is based off the comic with the same name. It describes his first year after more than a decade of being away training.

Batman Arkham City is a sequel to Batman Arkham Asylum. It's a Spider-man-esque game where you grapple across the city and beat up criminals and find your villains to stop their plots.

Beyond the fact that they're both Batman titles and both are released the same day, they really don't share much in common.

Doppleganger's argument of this being a movie game title, which tends to be a shitty game, just won't work. It's in no way connected to either Dark Knight Rises or Batman Year One aside from the main character being Batman. If it's anything like Asylum, it's an amazing game aside from this DLC bullshit.
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Old 10-20-2011, 07:23 PM   #10
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"We're large companies that have gone green by phasing out instruction books and cutting giant holes out of game cases! Aren't we great?" Meanwhile instead of instruction books, cases are filled with dlc codes (which mind you are more likely to get thrown away than the books). Or in this releases case, pieces of paper with no codes! How very enviro-friendly!
I think we tend to view "remember when games used to come in the box with cool stuff" with rose-tinted nostalgia, because who has most of that shit still laying around? On the other hand, it's emblematic of a time when game companies saw you as a customer and not solely as a cow to be milked.

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long post
I honestly think PC and console games need to be separated in this discussion for several reasons.

1. This thread was meant more to be a commentary on anti-used game measures rather than piracy/DRM (the former which was largely nonexistent on PC long before the current generation came calling). Attempting to stop piracy at least has some noble aim, misguided (or in Ubisoft's case, clinically retarded) though the application against it nearly always is. On the other hand, the anti-used games crusade being launched by most major publishers (which is basically the reason why Catwoman was split off into her own DLC to show the dirty used peasants what for) is pretty much the pinnacle of corporate cognitive dissonance.

2. The idea of a license has an actual track record in the PC arena, extremely legally dubious as it may be. On the other hand, until very recently the idea/argument that you buy a license when you buy a console game was not even in the fever dreams of the lawyers at most publishers. Until a large number of console games actually come with lengthy EULAs that you must agree to (that aren't just regurgitated XBLA/PSN agreements) I can't see the argument for "licensed" console games gaining much traction.

3. In most respects the physical PC game space is basically dead. An average Gamestop's PC selection is one rack's worth of game boxes that look like someone threw them in a drying machine for three hours, and even the selection at big box stores is pretty sad. Meanwhile you have DD stores offering games at better prices, with much larger selections (including games that would have never been a box release in the first place, like Recettear).

4. Steam is pretty fucking good. In return for Steam DRM (which is not onerous by any stretch of the imagination), you get access to stuff like autopatching and cloud saves (autopatching alone is pretty awesome), and you can straight up copy and paste games you've downloaded from one computer to another. Steam also gets a lot of good will for the frequent number of high-discount sales: most people can't be arsed to worry about the implications of DRM and ownership when they're getting an entire series of games or a game and multiple expansions for less than five bucks. But most importantly, Steam has to be this way, because:

5. The PC is an open platform that isn't dependent on maintaining the goodwill of major retailers. Steam has to be good because there are plenty of other DD services waiting to eat its lunch, and there's no barrier to entry from a single PC platform holder. If you don't like Steam's bullshit, you can go to places like D2D or GOG (the latter who provides old games with the necessary modifications to run them on modern systems, which also kind of highlights the point that given time, physical ownership of PC media isn't exactly ironclad from a use perspective). I wouldn't extend nearly as much goodwill to any DD-only console that was controlled primarily by one platform holder, but I don't think that's going to happen for a long time: most retailers simply aren't willing to be patsies for $300 consoles with $5 margins unless there's something in it for them. Which also happens to sort of tie into to why this console generation is kind of fucked up.

You don't see game stores that sell exclusively new games, because that isn't a viable business model. I've heard varying numbers in the second-hand echo chamber of the Internet and game forums, but a retailer cut of $8 to $12 (probably based on size, distributor and clout) seems to be the range on a $60 game. A 20% (at best) profit margin on a discretionary good that rapidly deprecates in value is not exactly the kind of product you focus on if your intent is to become the next Bill Gates. The first two graphs in this Gamasutra article illustrate the point: new games bring in a huge amount of revenue for Gamestop (leaps and bounds above anything else), but still loses out to used games in terms of actual profit generated. You could always say "lol Gamestop," but I have a feeling nearly every small, independent game store owner will tell you similarly. Alternatively, you're a Best Buy or Target for whom games are not a major profit generator, but a way to get people in your stores and sell them accessories/new TVs.

So Gamestop sells used games, because that's what Gamestop has to do as a business to actually survive. At the other end of the table sit game developers and publishers, who are dealing with rapidly increasing costs (technological, asset, etc.) and budgets that have not been offset by corresponding increases in demand. Because of this, game companies now have to get additional revenue streams wherever they can get them, and that means even trying to pump even used buyers for ten bucks: this is why you see "free, day one DLC for new owners" like Catwoman and the Mass Effect 2 Cerberus network (which, besides maybe Zaeed, was largely a collection of dogshit DLC that no one would have willingly paid for anyways).

I understand why this shit happens from a purely pragmatic perspective, but I fucking hate the cognitive dissonance involved. You have actual game developers on forums like Neogaf drinking the Kool-Aid, declaring that the first sale doctrine doesn't apply to video games (because, uh, something), and that games priced $5 lower are destroying their profit margins (even though Gamestop's own data shows that the average price for each used game they sell is $20 below that for each new game they sell). No acknowledgement that budgets are completely out of control ("because players demand it," even though players apparently demand it so much that they're bored with it in a week). No sense of self reflection involved when they complain about games being sold back to Gamestop a week after release, unwilling to ask themselves if there is maybe a reason why that happened in the first place. No willingness to admit that maybe, just maybe, ever increasing budgets to make games that cater almost exclusively to 18-34 year-old males is not a business model that can last into perpetuity.

I love video games, but fuck this industry.

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Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
I'm curious of what the big deal is, though. I understand console games are upwards of 30% more expensive than their PC counter-parts, but this Batman: Arkham City looks like the same seasonal, big movie tie-in games that brought us Harry Potter: The Game and Enter the Matrix.
Comparing Batman:AA to either of those games is bad and you should feel bad.

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Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
See, I don't understand why people play that game though, Doppel. Who in their right mind would rather have an e-Book for 2 years when you could have a physical book for-e-ver? Maybe not "forever" forever -- drop it in the toilet, spill coffee on it, lose it, lots of things could happen which might take it out of your possession -- but you'd still be more likely to have that book in 2 years' time than you would a time-limited e-Book.
The convenience of having your books on one tablet device that doesn't take up a huge amount of space is a major draw for a lot of people. For someone like my dad (a man who has taken so many business trips to third world countries with draconian smuggling laws and inept/corrupt airport employees that he will knife fight a bear before checking baggage), being able to take a few books along in a fraction of the space is a big deal.

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I don't like my privileges reduced either, but I'd sort of accepted it because I believed in hackers being able to illegally circumnavigate stuff if they wanted to.

But I don't hear stories of people playing illegally on Steam, so now I'm starting to worry.
Steam games have been hacked, AFAIK. On the other hand, how much of a fucking dipshit would you have to be to play a hacked Steam game through a Steam client?
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Last edited by Blastoise; 10-20-2011 at 07:33 PM.
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Old 10-21-2011, 05:44 AM   #11
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Just popping in to correct you on one point, Reed- Piracy has been an issue for PC game makers for a long time, which is why old games like Battletech/Pirates!/etc. came with instruction books that had specific information that the game would ask for. So if you're playing a Battletech game you copied, you're screwed when it asks you where the Intercooler is on a mech about fifteen minutes in. Admittedly it became much less of a problem when CDs took over the marketplace (so probably before your time) but I remember memorizing some questions from Hero's Quest so I could play it on my mom's computer as well as my dad's, so figured I'd point it out.
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