Via Ign.com
Batman: Arkham City is coming to PC in November, a month or so after it hits consoles at the end of October. More annoying for PC owners is that no specific date has been given, so while Xbox 360 and PS3 owners will be playing it on October 18 and 21 in the US and UK respectively, PC gamers are left pressing F5 to find out when they'll be able to slip into the Dark Knight's codpiece.
Why the delay? Neither Warner or Rocksteady provided a reason.
In other DC games related news.....
If the proposition of buying DC Universe Online and then paying a monthly fee has been keeping you away from Sony Online Entertainment's MMO, prepare to enter Gotham City next month. In October, DC Universe Online goes free to play.
Both PlayStation 3 and PC players will be able to download and play the game for free. Three tiered levels will act as the game's revenue source from there along with in-game microtransactions.
If you've already paid for a PC lifetime subscription or a PS3 plan, that deal still stands when this switch happens in late October. This event also marks the end of DCUO's mandatory auto-renew feature. In the past, the game would automatically resubscribe you when your subscription lapsed. That's still an option, but it's no longer mandatory -- a result of the more than 40 percent of people who quit EverQuest II and complained about the auto-renew in a SOE survey.
"We decided 'Let's listen to them'," said John Smedley, SOE president. "I don't know about you, but my credit card statement every month is this amalgam of s*** of MMOs that I'm too lazy to cancel. What we want is to offer people a way to not worry about that."
The announcement of the free to play move comes just seven months after SOE released DC Universe Online. SOE wouldn't go into the exact number of subscribers currently playing the game, but Smedley said numbers are up since the move to megaservers and that free to play was not in response to subscriber numbers.
"In terms of 'Is it a result in a drop in subs' – absolutely not," he said. "This is the right business model. If I can be honest, the game ended up costing a lot more than we thought it would, and this was our preferred business model from day one."
If you're a stickler for fair play, SOE said you don't have to worry about microtransactions breaking the game. Super-powerful items such as Superman's raid suit will not be purchasable and experience won't be for sale in October. The experience will be similar to Free Realms' free to play model, SOE said, and you can expect to see it in games that are out now and future releases.
"We are really seeing the benefits of free to play, and we're really liking it," Smedley said. "Needless to say we're paying close attention to it and maybe looking to make some surprise moves a little later."