Suicide Squad Game Fails to Live Up to Warner Bros. Sales Expectations

23.02.2024 - 20:15 / gamerant.com / Gunnar Wiedenfels / Dominik Bo

Warner Bros. Discovery is disappointed with the sales of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, having said as much as part of its latest financial report. Its lackluster launch performance doesn't inspire confidence in the game enjoying long-term support, which was never explicitly promised to begin with, as Rocksteady's announced content roadmap for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn't extend beyond 2024.

The new Suicide Squad game was released for PC and current-generation consoles on February 2. Its critical reception has been mixed, with its OpenCritic score currently sitting at 60 (out of 100), based on 107 reviews. And while player impressions have been notably more positive, the fact that the live-service shooter failed to generate significant sales momentum was already evident a week following its release, when Rocksteady's 9-year-old Batman game beat Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's Steam player count.

Warner Bros. Discovery has now officially acknowledged this challenging turn of events as part of the financial report for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2023. During a subsequent earnings call, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels told analysts that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League «has fallen short» of the company's sales expectations. Its lackluster performance set up Warner Bros. Discovery for a «tough» quarterly comparison to Q1 2023, when Hogwarts Legacy was breaking sales records left and right, ultimately becoming the best-selling game of the year.

Wiedenfels's comment on the Suicide Squad game's launch was made as part of a much broader outlook on the company's prospects in the upcoming quarter. The executive hence didn't attach a specific sales figure to Rocksteady's latest title. Looking at the publicly available data, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's Steam player count has been steadily dwindling throughout the month; its daily concurrent player peak went from around 13,500 at launch to fewer than 900 as of February 23.

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.

While some vocal sections of the DC fandom have previously argued that the game was destined to fail because it added to the already oversaturated market for live service shooters, it would be reductionist to attribute its lackluster launch to just its business model, genre, or both. After all, Helldivers 2 was released to immense success just six days later, selling a million copies in 72 hours despite its Sony publishing deal making it skip the Xbox Series X/S, an ecosystem with over 21 million users as of mid-2023.

Rocksteady has