This error does appear in Batman: Arkham City GOTY Steam if all patches are applied – but older DVDs, cracked versions, or launch-day builds still trigger it. The “QA Approved Build January” string is just a leftover dev message; the real cause is always one of the fixes above.

WB Games released an unmarked patch that fully strips GFWL remnants. Steam sometimes fails to auto-install it.

In the midst of this chaos, a mysterious build of the game began circulating online. Dated January 2012, this build was allegedly a QA (Quality Assurance) approved version of the game, created during the development process. This enigmatic build, measuring around 2.5 GB in size, claimed to resolve the fatal error issues plaguing players. As users began to download and test this build, a peculiar phenomenon emerged: the fatal error appeared to be resolved.

One user discovered that "the game has from time to time problems with the new Nvidia drivers" and solved it by temporarily rolling back to version 320.49 . This older driver predates many modern compatibility conflicts.

By following the steps above, particularly or forcing DX9 , you should be able to bypass this check and play the game. If you'd like, I can: