The Daily Populous Wednesday July 31st, 2024 evening edition
Authored by forbes.com and submitted by ElGofre

If a live service game unveils a cool plot twist, but no one is around to see it, does it really exist? That’s what’s currently happening with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which has revealed that its Justice League was not actually killed at all, and instead those were copies, with the real ones waiting to be rescued. First, The Flash, next? There’s Superman, Batman and Green Lantern to free. Tough luck, Wonder Woman.

But tracking the ongoing determination of Suicide Squad to finish out its year of four seasons is…bleak. Now that season 2 launched, we can see how it performed on Steam at least. PlayStation only shows us its top 10 games and Xbox its top 50, and clearly it didn’t rank on either of those lists. Rather on Steam, season 2’s launch only garnered 572 peak players, only a little more than double the 200 or so that had stuck around before the launch, with some periodic, small surges when the game went on sale.

This is, perhaps as expected, going differently than the launch of the Joker season, which didn’t exactly skyrocket things to a healthy level, but was about a 600% increase late March. But even those who gave that season a shot then are mostly gone now. Myself included, as I uninstalled the game recently to make room for others on my SSD.

Part of the issue was the release of a character no one especially wanted to play, Mrs. Freeze, a gender-flipped version of the Batman villain, aka not the one we fought multiple times in the Arkham series. She arrives with the same problem, a frozen wife who needs help, and even with a cool ice surfing traversal ability, she was never going to resonate as much as Joker. Not that people even liked alt-universe Joker that much either. I fear the same problem will present itself with Zoe Lawton, Deadshot’s daughter, next season, as she’s such a minor figure rather than a rogue gallery type villain. The only announced character players have been looking forward to is Deathstroke in season 4.

You can see the plan here, which assumed that Suicide Squad would be a hit and would be able to tell its full story over the course of a couple years. But the problem there was that it had to cut off its main campaign about halfway through in order to bury the live reveals later. There were indications that we did not kill the actual Justice League during the main game, but only tiny hints and no outright reveals. That’s only happened now with the resurgence of the “real” Flash.

The logical endpoint of this is that evil Arkham Batman dying is not the last we see of Arkham Batman after all. Fans complained this was going out on a low point, both for the star of the Arkham games but also departed voice actor Kevin Conroy, where this was some of his final work as Batman across any medium. We do not know that if Batman returns that Conroy voiced new lines ahead of time.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Rocksteady

I would in fact like to know what the overall storyline is here, which will now have to end after a single year, as there will not be a second with these numbers. If the game is increasing its playercount at all it’s because of deep discounts or outright giveaways on a few platforms. I’ve said it’s worth playing for cheap or free for some of its combat and buildcrafting alone, but it’s far from a cohesive whole.

This season is performing as I expected, though perhaps even a little worse. I respect them pushing ahead but I just don’t think there’s any real point, and it would be wise to call it a day and move on to other projects at this point.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.

TheOddEyes on July 31st, 2024 at 13:23 UTC »

Ooof, it didn’t even beat Arkham Asylum’s player count.

On Jul 25th, 2024, Suicide Squad had a player count of 572 while Arkham Asylum had 734 players.

Here’s a chart comparing the player count of all Arkham games.

Thetwitchingvoid on July 31st, 2024 at 12:56 UTC »

Absolutely wild the studio that gave us the Arkham games churned out this.

Bokko88 on July 31st, 2024 at 12:11 UTC »

They hit 100% of their target audience