In a financial call, Warner Bros. Discovery said that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League “has fallen short of our expectations” since it launched at the start of February. Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels didn’t mention any sales figures for the game, but he did add (via IGN) that the company’s game division is going to be in for a “tough year” when it’s compared to 2023 and the blockbuster success of Hogwarts Legacy.
Compared to the Potterverse game, which was the best-selling game of 2023 in the US, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has had a tough time keeping players engaged. On Steam, it reached a peak concurrent playercount of 13,459 and those numbers have been steadily declining since then on that platform. Rocksteady has long-term plans for post-launch support, kicking off with the first season of content in March, the arrival of the Joker as a playable character, and possibly a resurrection of a key Justice League member in December.
There are several reasons for the poor performance of Suicide Squad, as even before it was released, previews for the game weren’t entirely positive. Upon launch, Suicide Squad earned mixed or average reviews, and on GameSpot’s sister site Metacritic, the game has a Metascore of 60 from 87 reviews. Suicide Squad also launched during a very busy month for high-profile releases, as several live-service games were all competing for a very limited slice of the audience retention pie.
Square Enix’s Foamstars and Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones also launched this month, while Helldivers 2 has been a headline-dominating game as hundreds of thousands of players have flocked to that game. “Rocksteady’s first game in nearly a decade can’t shake the superhero-as-a-service genre’s ubiquitous feeling that it exists to keep players mindlessly engaged,” Mark Delaney wrote in GameSpot’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League review.
