By Nine years after “Batman: Arkham Knight” hit in 2015, Rocksteady Studios finally released “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” a few weeks back and the results have not been good.
As part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Friday, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels offered an update on the game’s early performance saying:
“We are lapping the release of ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ in February last year, which saw the largest portion of its very positive financial impact in the first quarter.
This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key video game releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comp in Q1.”
The game, which had server issues and an auto-completion bug in its launch week, released to mixed critical reception and a rapidly dwindling player base – not good for a live service game.
Enthusiasm for the game waned prior to release as a protracted development cycle and backlash to its live service elements took hold of the discourse around the title.
Now, nearly four weeks since it released, its Steam concurrent player count of 13,459 at its height on launch weekend has plummeted to repeatedly below 500 several hours of today and below 1,000 over the past 36 hours.
To put that in comparison, “Batman: Arkham Knight” launched to heights of 27,405 on Steam, and at the same point in time a few weeks later it was still at around 4,000 concurrent players on Steam (even with that PC port’s infamous issues).
In fact, “Arkham Knight” today (nine years later) is pulling in well over 5,000 concurrent players right now. Prior entries like “Arkham City” are at 2,100 and “Arkham Asylum” at 2,300.
The news follows comments in November by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, which said the company was focused on turning its biggest franchises into live service games – moving away from the “Hogwarts Legacy” and “Batman: Arkham Knight” style single-player game model towards more titles like “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League”.
Source: VGC
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