By Rocksteady’s “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” launched last week to tepid critics reviews, though audience reviews were a little better.
On Steam, reviews from players seem upbeat with 4,000 positive reviews to 700 negative ones. That doesn’t appear to have translated to sales or interest though.
From Friday through Sunday, the game hit peaks of at least 12,000 daily and an absolute peak of 13,459 players according to SteamDb. The number dropped to a peak of 8,311 on Monday and 7,051 on Tuesday.
To put that in comparison, “Marvel’s Avengers” launched to an opening weekend peak of 31,165 players on Steam in September 2020 – within one month it had dropped to daily peaks of around 2,000.
“Gotham Knights” opened to a peak of 24,138 players before seeing even larger drops. “Mortal Kombat 1” hit a first week peak of 38,129 players, whilst “Hogwarts Legacy” released a year ago to a stunning 879,308 concurrent players.
As Forbes puts it bluntly: “After seven years of work by Rocksteady and years more content planned? It’s a disaster, there’s no way around it.”
Steam isn’t the only concerning metric. GamesIndustry.Biz head Christopher Dring says on X that though the title was the No.1 physical game sold last week in the UK, as a point of comparison “it did about half of Guardians of the Galaxy” sales at launch – that game was seen as a financial disappointment even as it was critically praised.
All this follows on from a report a few days ago also via GamesIndustry.Biz who linked to the 2023 Game Development Report that surveyed 537 development studios around the world about the state of the industry.
It indicates 95% of studios surveyed are developing or maintaining a live-service game, with 66% saying live-service is necessary for the long-term success of a video game.
Making those titles is also taking up a lot of time and effort as live-service titles can take more than five years to develop, as opposed to the two or three-year average of single-player titles.
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