Summary
It’s fair to say thatSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’spost-launch plans probably aren’t going the way thatRocksteadyandWarner Bros.wanted them to. Its player count has been dropping ever since launch, despitea small bump from the release of the Joker in Season 1, and it’s now dropped so low though that more players are actually playing a game that’s been pronounced dead for months.
First spotted byWindows Central, there was a brief moment earlier today in which Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League had a smaller concurrent player count than fellow superhero live-service disappointmentMarvel’s Avengers. If you checkthe game’s player stats on SteamDB, you can see that Suicide Squads' current players dropped to a pretty dismal 118 at 11am UTC.
Checkthe player stats for Marvel’s Avengers: Definitive Editionon Steam, which you cannot actually buy any more as the option has been removed from the store page, and you’ll see the game’s player count was at a slightly less dismal 123 during the same timeframe. Granted, that’s a difference of less than half a dozen players, but it’s pretty atrocious when you take into account thatMarvel’s Avengers has been declared deadfor longer than Suicide Squad has been on store shelves.
We don’t know what the game’s player count is like on consoles, though it’s difficult to imagine it faring any better, since it’s a premium title that cost $70 at launch. With so few players, it’s going to be difficult for Rocksteady and Warner Bros. to justify spending so much time, effort, and moneyto create post-launch contentthat less than a thousand people are actually going to play.
Suicide Squad will have its ardent defenders, as pretty much every live service title does, but Warner Bros. has done a fantastic job of keeping away any potential returning playerswith the scuffed launch of Season 1. We’ll see slight bumps in players upon the launch of each new season, no matter how small they may be, but the days of thousands of players flocking to Suicide Squad are pretty much over.
Rocksteady must surely be ready to move onto whatever it has planned next, rather than support a game that’s already on its last legs, but we can only wait and see whether the developer sticks to its word and delivers one year’s worth of free post-launch DLC. Don’t be surprised if Warner Bros. decides to just pull the plug though.
