Suicide Squad
Rocksteady
It was not difficult to see this coming, but now Warner Bros. is facing the music regarding Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Rocksteady’s critical and commercial failure attempting to herd its Arkhamverse into the live service genre.
During a financial call, WB CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said that the game had “fallen short of our expectations.” No numbers were shared but because the game is doing so poorly, he says it has created a “tough year” for the games business going forward in comparison to last year’s smash-hit Hogwarts Legacy, the best-selling game of 2023. While it was never going to be possible for Suicide Squad to get anywhere close to that, the scope of the failure here is something that needs to be studied.
From day one, the game was a critical disaster. It hoisted a red flag by not sending out review copies, but when the dust settled it had a 60 on Metacritic, a horrible score for a AAA game and one that has led lesser studios to shut down entirely in the past.
It’s true that user scores were much higher across PlayStation, Xbox and Steam, but that did not translate to meaningful player numbers. The game peaked at 13,459 players on Steam, half of what Marvel’s Avengers did, a tenth of Outriders. I never saw it rise higher than the top 20 in Xbox’s most-played games list. The only place it seemed to do reasonably well was on its marketing partner system PlayStation, appearing as a top game at launch there.
Suicide Squad
Steamdb
But now? Forget about it. It’s out of the PlayStation top 10, it’s out of the Xbox top 50, it’s now peaking at under 1,000 players on Steam. Last night it capped out at 888 players, with a low of 466. This is three weeks after the launch of a game that’s supposed to be a live service and continuing to engage players. Even if games like Anthem and Avengers were ultimately considered failures, this debut and drop-off is on a level far past those, even if I don’t personally think the game is this level of bad to deserve this (I did give it a 6.5/10, however). It’s a tremendous miscalculation that anyone wanted this game in the first place, when it’s easy to see how say, a Rocksteady Superman or Wonder Woman single player game could have moved 10 million copies easily.
The question now is what on earth does post-launch support look like for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? It’s about to launch a Joker-themed season in a few weeks, but from there? Even if at least a year of content is already planned and possibly built out, with player numbers this low and up-front sales being poor, you are going to be throwing bad money after bad. The other problem here is monetization at its core, as future characters and seasons aren’t even being sold. They’re free, and you have to convince players to just buy cosmetics alone. This is what Avengers did and well, we know what happened there.
Not to mention, the game’s current problems are the worst they’ve been. In an attempt to fix the game for some players who haven’t been able to play online since launch, a new patch has broken the game further and led to mass errors for players who previous had no problems (myself included). It’s a nightmare.
I’ve been harping on this game a lot, but this is a failure on a level we rarely see for a game with so much time and energy invested, and it can’t simply be glossed over. We’ll see what the future holds, but it ain’t bright.
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