Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has fallen short of expectations, its publisher says

2 months ago 81

Warner Bros. say it'll be a tough year-on-year comparison

An explosion of numbers and noise in Suicide Squad. Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Warner Bros

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League "has fallen short of our expectations," according to Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Financial Officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels.

Wiedenfels made the statement during a financial call to investors.

"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 [comparison] in Q1," Wiedenfels said, as reported by IGN.

Suicide Squad was released on February 2nd. Last February, Warner Bros. released Hogwarts Legacy, which sold extremely well.

Rocksteady's return to the superhero genre has been beset by persistent server and login issues, but the game that lies beyond those issues has also been heavily criticised.

"There’s a really excellent single-player action game hiding somewhere deep inside Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, calling out for help from beneath a few metric tonnes of loot-addled drudgery," wrote Steve Hogarty in our Suicide Squad review. "The vast talent of Rocksteady peeps out just often enough to make it worthwhile for the genre’s fans, but the game’s extended development time has Suicide Squad chasing old trends, leaving it feeling cautious, unambitious and old-fashioned."

Kill The Justice League has become fig. 1 for players tired of 'live service' video games and frustrated by publishers that continue to make them. Partly that's because it's the work of Rocksteady, who previously made three beloved singleplayer games in the Batman: Arkham series, and so it's easy to build a narrative of wholesome creatives being crushed by the yoke of corporate overlords. I'd personally argue that people are just tired of bad live service games, which attempt to make their games sticky via tedious daily challenges and the tangled mess of fussy combat, meagre loot and multiple currencies.

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