Rocksteady has a solid track record. It’s a developer that many people trust because of the Arkham games. Fast forward almost 9 years from the Arkham Knight game, we’re met with a live-service Suicide Squad game.
Now, for me, I always had my concerns from the beginning. I know this game has been in development for a long time and began development at the height of Destiny. We’ve learned now that these games just don’t work.
They had a good foundation for building a game for the Suicide Squad and the story was great but it wasn’t enough. We’ve seen games fail time and time again when they try this similar model. Marvel’s Avengers, Anthem, and even somewhat The Division were largely unimpressive, especially the 1st one.
People don’t care for it. There’s a glaringly obvious reason as to why; microtransactions.
There’s something that feels like a slap in the face when you spend £70 on a game only for it to be filled with microtransactions. The issue with Suicide Squad more than anything is the outfits in the game are awful and you don’t get many at all so the only way to change the cosmetics is (you guessed it), MONEY.
Even Marvel’s Avengers got this aspect right with tons of suits you could unlock by natural progression whereas with this, it’s limited to 2 suits that have different aspects for them. It’s trash and I refuse to spend money because of this.
As Steam is the only platform that shows the player count, we’re unable to provide figures for consoles but in regards to Steam, there’s a laughable 403 players playing as of 3 minutes ago at the time of writing this article.
To compare stats, Marvel’s Avengers had an average player count of 1,430. This is around a month after release. That’s a considerable difference when you think about it.
The issue the developers had was that they couldn’t release any promotional material without players absolutely shredding it. I hardly saw any positive comments about the game pre-release, it was all negative. When a lot of people expected a follow-up Batman game to be met with this was always going to cause issues.
Warner Bros. Discovery, Rocksteady’s parent company has already claimed that the game has fallen short of their expectations. They claimed the game hasn’t done the business they hoped for but it begs belief. Surely they realized this from the first trailer by players’ comments that this was never going to over-exceed. Surely, surely someone checks feedback on trailers and other promotional material? I don’t know but I knew this game was never going to do well.
I even asked Phil, our other writer if he thinks this game will outlast Marvel’s Avengers. He thinks it will but I don’t know, I can’t see it. Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix lost a lot of money on Avengers and this isn’t even living up to the same numbers as that game. I’m not a financial expert or analyst or anything but it does raise eyebrows from players.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate this game. I like it for the most part. I’m playing a lot of Modern Warfare 3 at the moment so when that game stresses me out, I take an hour or two out and jump on Suicide Squad. It’s never an experience I dislike or hate. I enjoy myself. I just can’t play for too long because my eyes don’t like it. That’s only because there’s too much going on constantly. The numbers, everything going on and the unintuitive UI can give me a headache if I play too much.
Disclaimer here, I can play games for hours on end. I’m that type of person. I played Jedi Survivor for 11 hours on launch day and had no issues. It’s just this game that does that.
So, going off the question. Was it always destined to fail? I hate to say it but I believe so. I don’t think a season pass and Joker is going to help. Maybe it will and I’ll come back to this and eat my words, I hope I do. I always want to see superhero games succeed because success means we get more. I always want more.
I realistically didn’t have much hope for this prior to the game’s release and I don’t have a lot more now, more so considering the execs have even said it’s fallen short of expectations. How much more will they pump in the servers, development, new stories, and characters all whilst losing money? We’ll see how it plays out.
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