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Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Has "Fallen Short" Of Expectations, Warner Bros. Discovery Says

Warner Bros. Discovery knows that it won't have another Hogwarts Legacy on its hands in 2024.

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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.

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Now Playing: Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Everything To Know

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.

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redviperofdorne

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Can anyone involved in the making of this honestly be surprised?

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hardwenzen

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Edited By hardwenzen

Deserves every drop of failure it has gotten. And lets not forget, they delayed the game by a year FOR THIS.🤣

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brxricano

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.....gasp?

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uninspiredcup

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A bad company.

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Slannmage

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Slannmage  Online

And that's the end of Rocksteady.

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swantn5

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Edited By swantn5

i liked it was it the greatest DC game ever no but was decent

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taylorspace

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I actually had fun with it. It wasn't amazing or anything, but the traversal and shooting was good. Story was ridiculous but it had its funny moments.

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Flyin3lvl

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""we dont want live service games""

whats that i can log off the gamespot comments and log into helldivers 2.

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Tiwill44

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All according to plan. Rocksteady, we salute your sacrifice.

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makchady

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I wonder when publishers will realize that shorter, less feature-rich experiences are a better bet than all these multiplayer live service games. Games such as Alan Wake 2, Super Mario Wonder, Armored Core 6, and many others are proving that you can have success with an 8-20 hour game. Obviously, Rocksteady's Arkham series found massive success. You can also look to other AAA examples such as Doom and Wolfenstein recently. And that's before we dive into the rabbit hole that is indie games--Dave the Diver, Cocoon, Lies of P, Dredge, A Space for the Unbound, and the list goes on and on.

I miss the 360 days when you had Bioshock, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Portal 1 and 2, etc. The 8-20 hour single player experiences were commonplace where they're now rare and largely relegated to indie titles. You have an entire generation of gamers (those that grew up on the N64/PS1, Xbox/PS2, 360/PS3 eras) that have little interest in bloated, online-only messes. We're still gamers, but we now have careers and children. So, not only is there an audience, but it's also cheaper to produce these more-consolidated game experiences.

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makchady

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Edited By makchady

@donaldtrump69: Time will tell. They’ve sold 1.3 million copies, and I expect this game will have a very long sales life cycle. It may not be the slam dunk they wanted (or it deserved), but to take a gamble on a $70 million project like Alan Wake 2 is less risky than taking a $200 million gamble on Skull and Bones. At least Remedy’s reputation grows which will help future endeavors. Anything Ubisoft Singapore does for their next title (assuming there even is one) is likely doomed. The general point is that companies should focus more on 8-20 hour single player games instead of games as a service with insane budgets.

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s1taz4a3l

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Edited By s1taz4a3l

@donaldtrump69:

Dont worry youll get it on steam Soon™, for now foam at the mouth for another year :P

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ezio899

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@makchady: You can entirely blame the unicorn GaaS titles such as CoD, Fortnite, Sports, GTA5 where they just print money with little to no effort. To a lesser extent Destiny 2 but that game is pretty much dead. Now all the major publishers are chasing the unicorn with every attempt to get rich quickly. But the pool for whales blowing all their money on GaaS is dried up. Shareholders don't care that 95% of GaaS die within the first year. They are still gonna throw money and ignore every red flag to get lucky with the 5%. They are the addicts they're trying to catch.

The writing was on the wall that this game was going to fail. The mass majority of gamers said hell no from the first gameplay trailers. Even more so when it was announced as GaaS. The devs that quit mid-production are the ones who wanted another Arkham game and not this garbage.

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