Warner Bros. Games has admitted defeat in the long-running saga around Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. According to a long expose written by Jason Schreier and the company's own financial reports, the game has amounted to an enormous $200 million loss for the company.
News in brief
- Suicide Squad is an enormous financial failure
- This admission comes after months of low player numbers and disappointing DLC
- The game's future is uncertain
While the financial loss must sting, the true scope of the failure at hand is apparent from Schreier's Bloomberg report, where interviews with a number of the game's development staff lay bare the scale of the interference from executives, who seem to have been chasing whichever game trends were hot at that particular time.
One particularly egregious example is a pivot from melee combat into gunplay, with developers left scratching their heads for a reason as to why a character like Captain Boomerang — named for his signature weapon — would abandon his trusty weapon for a gun. Decisions like this seem to have impacted development again and again, with the final result being, well, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Perhaps all of this would have been forgiven had the game been a hit, but it became apparent from day one of launch that this would not be the case. Low player counts have plagued the game almost since launch, and nothing Rocksteady can do seems to bring players back. A Joker-themed DLC was released, along with the character himself, but it seems to have sunk without a trace, with even those players hanging around complaining that the DLC required far too much retreading of content to access.
Ultimately, this is a failure that cannot be laid at the feet of Rocksteady's developers. It seems that the desire for a "live service" model from executives has gradually pushed Suicide Squad into a position where it was impossible for the game to actually be, well, good. Too many cooks, not enough broth is an understatement for what happened here, and unfortunately, we all know it won't be the executives who pay the price for the game's failure.
