Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
I have just checked back in to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to see how things are going over there during the launch of its first season, and the answer is “somehow worse than I expected.”
Despite a post-season launch pass that was supposed to eliminate a number of issues, one of those was not eliminating the multi-hour grind to unlock Joker, and the brief surge of players the game received has fallen down to quite literally almost nothing.
As of this week, Suicide Squad is now peaking at 214 players on Steam. The lowest so far during off-hours is 102 players. While the game never did terribly well on Steam, peaking at 13,000 players at launch and getting back to only 3,000 when Joker launched, I think we now have to ask ourselves the question “when do you just abandon a premade live service roadmap?”
Charts
The idea was always that no matter what, Suicide Squad would get out content to last the year, but that still requires polish and fixes and support, even if much of it may be in fact done right now. But there is a point where you want to consider cutting your losses entirely. Given that this is cost-cutting Warner Bros. we’re talking about, this seems like an especially relevant issue.
The counterpoint that console numbers are higher just doesn’t resonate. Suicide Squad has not been in the top 50 most played games on Xbox since a short while after launch, and the Joker season didn’t put it there either. We have no data on PlayStation players since it never regained footing in the visible top 10. There are “leaderboard” numbers that show up in-game, but it’s unclear how those are calculated, whether they are live players or if they’re counting anyone who ever logged into the game.
One last-ditch attempt to salvage things might be to do a deal with PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass, something Marvel’s Avengers eventually did itself, but it still was not enough to keep things running in the long term. But this is still the short term, and we’re talking about a game that is barely a couple months old.
The problem with the roadmap is also the nature of the roadmap. Joker is obviously the biggest-name character they are adding this year. The next two seasons are a gender-flipped Mrs. Freeze and then Zoe Lawton, Deadshot’s daughter. Only when you reach season 4 in 7-8 months will the game see Deathstroke arrive, a character many players are genuinely looking forward to (myself included!). There is an idea that Rocksteady should just pull the trigger and release everything all at once instead of spacing it out, but again, that’s not how it works. Not all of this is actually done yet, and you can’t just do that.
The Roadmap
There’s also monetization, in that the game is now only monetized through cosmetics. Those are season passes which have proved to be a brutal grind, or store skins which have proven to be very, very poor so far. Seasons and characters themselves are not sold, though in this case, they did put a grind barrier in front of Joker that you could pay to skip, something everyone hated.
It feels like PS Plus or Game Pass is the only way forward, but I don’t think that will change anything. And with these numbers, not just bad, but almost unbelievably low, there’s no reversing course here if the first season didn’t fix enough issues, add enough content or attract enough people. At this point, I would call it, and try to get Rocksteady working in full on something completely different more aligned with player interests. I genuinely hope we are not headed toward significant layoffs over there as a result of this game.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
