It hasn’t even been a month since its launch, however writer Warner Bros. Video games is disenchanted in its live-service shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. With barely 1,000 individuals taking part in the sport on Steam, the corporate has flat-out acknowledged that Suicide Squad utterly missed its purported expectations.
Chatting with shareholders throughout a February 23 earnings name, Warner Bros. Discovery chief monetary officer Gunnar Wiedenfels mentioned Rocksteady’s newest action-adventure sport. He didn’t present any gross sales figures for Suicide Squad, however Wiedenfels admitted the sport didn’t carry out in addition to the corporate had hoped for, notably when in comparison with Hogwarts Legacy’s meteoric success.
“We’re lapping the discharge of Hogwarts Legacy in February final 12 months, which noticed the biggest portion of its very optimistic monetary affect within the first quarter,” Wiedenfels mentioned. “This 12 months, Suicide Squad, considered one of our key online game releases in 2024, has fallen wanting our expectations since its launch earlier within the quarter, setting our video games enterprise up for a tricky year-over-year comp in Q1.”
Rocksteady is a studio that made a reputation for itself with the beloved Arkham sequence, a franchise so seminal to the business that its fight mechanics impressed hit video games like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Sleeping Canines. The Arkham video games are gritty, single-player affairs that function a dense Gotham value exploring. By comparability, Suicide Squad, a live-service sport that has extra in widespread with WB Video games Montréal’s Gotham Knights than Arkham Knight, looks like a hollowed-out repository for every day challenges and weekly occasions. It’s not horrible. It’s simply not nice both, and depends extra on fixed engagement than fulfilling gameplay. Kotaku’s personal Zack Zwiezen put it succinctly in his overview:
Ultimately, Suicide Squad is simply…okay. Superb. Not superb. Not a trainwreck. People wanting this sport to be a whole catastrophe will likely be disenchanted to find a very superb shooter that solely succumbs to live-service corruption on the finish. And for people wanting one thing they’ll play for years, effectively, I hope you want capturing purple crystals time and again.
Suicide Squad is a poster youngster for the form of video games that stay between nice and terrible. Whereas that is perhaps sufficient for some, I can’t think about the devs who labored exhausting on Suicide Squad (or writer WB, who footed the invoice for the sport) wished all of it to finish with what quantities to a shrug emoji. But, right here we’re. Not less than the shotguns are cool.
Kotaku has reached out to Warner Bros. for remark.
Perhaps the ship will get rotated and Suicide Squad will hit Warner Bros.’ benchmarks. In spite of everything, the endgame plans sound promising and new playable characters—Joker and Mr. Freeze (perhaps?)—will be a part of the roster quickly. It’s by no means too late for a sport to get good. I simply want Suicide Squad was pleasant off the rip.
