Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was supposed to herald in a new era for Rocksteady Games and the beloved Arkham-verse. Instead, it’s looking like it may achieve what the Joker and Brainiac never could – wiping out this iteration of the DC universe forever and leaving no survivors. After a troubled development period marked by delays, disastrous previews, and slippery interviews in which developers insisted that this live service game was not a live service game, the full product emerged earlier this month to underwhelming reviews.
Many suspected the game had flopped, but now we have the confirmation from Warner Bros. themselves. In a financial call, Warner Bros. Discovery’s chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels has admitted that Suicide Squad has “fallen short of our expectations”.
How short? Let’s look at what data we have. First up, the game debuted at #19 on the Xbox charts, which is far lower than Warner Bros. would have liked. It then proceeded to quickly crash out of the top 50 most-played games. The numbers are less opaque over on Steam, where the ever-useful SteamDB gives us precise player numbers at any given time.
As you may have surmised from the headline, as of writing 579 people are playing the game on Steam right now. If you would like to imagine what this means in real terms, you could almost certainly fit 579 people in one decently sized multiplex screening, so Warner Bros.’ multimillion-dollar nine-year development investment is currently entertaining the same number of people as a single sold-out screening of Madame Web.
By way of comparison to another live service game, the recently released Helldivers 2 currently has 215,419 players in-game. What all this means is that Suicide Squad is flatlining and we’d be astonished if the promised multi-season roadmap is completed. Sure, we’ll get the Joker DLC coming in March, but beyond that we suspect it’s game over for Suicide Squad. Let’s just hope the offline mode gets patched in before then.