No. But you don't need a source to know how that business is run. Developers do what they're told. They don't get to make those business decisions. They don't even have the full creative control. Publishers deals with the money side of business. They have the final say in those matters even if the developer is involved. It's like a chain of command.
I agree that developer has a responsibility, but ultimately it's up to the publisher to delay the game if it's not yet finished. Rocksteady is probably lucky that WB let them delay it the first time around. Big publishers don't like delays.
Maybe I'm just too sympathetic to Batman, but that will be great for getting developers in general off of Gameworks, but this is supposed to be the last game of the trilogy, which means no more being a bat after this.
Not to mention in a couple of weeks everything will probably run fine anyways, and it will be runner for game of the year. idk
Someone actually made a good point about Nvidia lying to their customers AGAIN. If you remember, Nvidia and WB had released Arkham Knight video showcasing 60fps and ultra textures. Neither of those are present in the game. I have to agree with whoever wrote this. It does seem like they knew that they were releasing an unfinished product. The port was outsourced to a console studio of 12 people: http://www.vgstations.com/en/news/item/4012-batman-arkham-knight-pc-port-outsourced-to-external-developer.html
The PC version of a Gameworks title is a mess? Oh no, who would have thought?! How could this be possible! /s
I'm looking forward to some of the Gameworks apologists and I'm genuinely curious on the views of some PC focused youtubers (mainly TotalBiscuit). He has stated before that he won't buy an AMD GPU, because, well, erm, reasons, and I get that he's not into hardware, but he (and many others) will have to realize that they have to care and inform themselves about hardware to some degree when they are a PC focused channel and that Gameworks simply isn't helping anyone. I hope that some people will call out this bs and not just ignore it, especially if you claim to always be consumer-first.
There you have the Principal Rendering Engineer at Infinity Ward, Graphics/Engine Programmer at Sony Santa Monica Studio and Technical Director on Frostbite at Electronic Arts openly complaining and condemning Gameworks and Nvidias lack of openness and documentation. "The unusable blackbox that is Gameworks", "can't understand a $$$-model-pay to hack games with 'features'-blasphemy", etc. Several developers have openly stated that Gameworks is a mess to work with and that they can't properly optimize for it, so you leave the complete optimization of the game to Nvidia, which is, inevitably, going to screw over people who use AMD hardware. There are huge deals in place for games to use Gameworks, or do you really think that something that is this loathed would be voluntarily used by game-devs? Also, I think you really overestimate the position of a dev in a multi-billion dollar corporation, if the publisher wants the game out next week then the dev has to comply, period. You're basically asking people to lose their job (just to be replaced by the next person) to prevent a broken game from launching. Sorry, but nobody in their right mind would do that. A game-dev does what he is told, they hold no real power when it comes to AAA releases because they're not the ones funding it. And as others have mentioned, Gameworks titles have not run "better" on Nvidia hardware, they've run like complete shit on all systems across the board. That's what we've seen lately, the only real exception being Witcher which ran "okay" for the most part (but was still buggy as all hell). Gameworks is not optimization for Nvidia, Gameworks is a proprietary "black box" of libraries and code that messes up everything that it touches. That's the issue with it. If gameworks just gave Nvidia cards an advantage by improving performance on them then that would be totally fine, heck that would be awesome. But from what we've seen it simply doesn't do games any good.
It doesn't rule it out since developers can't optimize for GameWorks at all. And since these devs are inexperienced, who knows how much they screwed the game and how much of that is the fault of trying to implement GameWorks instead of working on making sure that the game works as advertized. This shit keeps happening in GameWorks titles all the time.
And it's not like Nvidia even gives a shit. GameWorks is a marketing stunt for graphics whores who don't know any better. Nvidia doesn't care if their own cards suffer from worse performance as long as AMD suffers even worse. GameWorks is entirely anti-consumer and anti-competitive.
