Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League wasn't a terrible game but it also wasn't what most people would consider "good" either. It was so very not good that it quite negatively impacted Warner Bros. Discovery's latest financial quarter.
According to their latest Q1 financial results, WB Discovery said that its Games revenue declined significantly. All told, the company saw a $200 million hit to revenues in the latest quarter.
The sales of the game were so bad that WB Discovery CEO flat out said during an earnings call that the game was "disappointing." The company took an impairment charge due to the game. WB Discovery saw a huge year over year decline from the same quarter in 2023. In addition to Suicide Squad tanking the year over year financials, the same quarter in 2023 was huge for WB Discovery due to the release of Hogwarts Legacy that year.
This also isn't the first time that WB Discovery admitted that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League flopped. We just now have a better understanding of how badly it did.
An opinion piece from Forbes includes a few points about what they think went wrong with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
- Players questioned the nature of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League from the start, wondering why Rocksteady did not make another single player superhero game in the vein of their Arkham series. In short, this was a game no one was asking for, and had to be sold on. They weren’t.
- The “live service looter shooter” angle was reportedly not forced by management, but it was Rocksteady’s leadership who made the decision to pursue the game instead of alternatives.
- The game’s first extended look was poorly received and the game was delayed well into the following year soon after.
- The most positive press the game got were leaks from the closed alpha that players were restricted from talking about until WB eventually removed that restriction. Many said it was more fun than they thought it would be.
- The game launched to extremely poor review scores. It has a 60 on Metacritic, a disastrous result for a AAA game and one of the worst major releases of the last few years. Still, it attracted mostly positive player scores on PC, PS5 and Xbox.
- While we do not know sales figures, they appear dismal, and reports are that they were lower than even the worst-case scenario expectations for release. The game did debut on PlayStation, where it was heavily promoted, as the #1 game, but it soon dropped out of the top 10 list. It never got above the top 20 on Xbox. On Steam, it debuted with half the concurrent peak of Marvel’s Avengers, and now the “live, ongoing” game peaks at under 200 players a night, less than Marvel’s Avengers does currently, a game that is quite literally not even for sale anymore.
- The game aborted its central narrative in order to serve its live service ambitions with a “continuing story.” But the launch of its current Joker season resparked little interest in the game, and future seasons will contain even lesser-known characters. Future content like new characters and missions is also free, and players will only have to pay for cosmetics, which have trickled out at a snail’s pace, meaning little revenue is coming in for the live game. The game is currently promoting big changes for Episode 2 of this current season, one that is supposed to come out around now, according to past scheduling, but somehow still does not even have a release date.
There are still currently plans to continue releasing new seasonal content for Suicide Squad. There was another poorly reviewed title, Redfall, which was also supposed to get some new downloadable content. Redfall's developer, Arkane Austin, was just shut down by Microsoft this week and that content was never released. That is to say, there is no guarantee that the planned content for Rocksteady's Suicide Squad will be released either.
