Joker
This Thursday, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will test its live service ambitions with its first, hefty free content update which will give players the Joker as a new squad member, along with a new host of weapons, some new missions and a new (“new”) boss fight.
This is, in effect, probably the do-or-die moment for Suicide Squad. Yes, they have a year’s worth of content mapped out, but this is the closest live release to launch, which should theoretically be its biggest by default. Plus it is giving players a recognizable character, the Joker, as opposed to a gender-flipped version of Mr. Freeze the following season and Deadshot’s daughter the season after that. The fourth season is supposed to release the higher-profile Deathstroke, but I am not convinced the game is even going to last until then.
I am going to be watching the game’s performance where available. We only have access to the top 10 games at any given time on PlayStation, where Suicide Squad was number one at launch for a brief time. But it never got above the top 20 on Xbox, and quickly dropped out of the top 50, which is all we can see online. Steam has been an utter disaster for Suicide Squad with a launch half as big as Marvel’s Avengers, and concurrent playercounts have been peaking at under 1,000 for about a month now. It’s current the 1,011th best-selling game on the platform. It current has 65 Twitch viewers, down from 155,177 when it was sponsoring streamers to play at launch.
Steamdb
There needs to be almost stratospheric improvement in these numbers, which seems impossible, given how low they are at baseline. Will this result in a surge…at all? This is still a game with very positive user scores on all platforms, and there are some solid features like engaging combat and some fun builds. But the game is lacking overall, in part because it butchered its main storyline to start the process of building live content where the game tells us we have to fight 13 Brainiac variants in total, which sounds exhausting.
As for this release specifically, this is an alternate universe version of the Joker, not the dead Arkham variant, with a new look and non-Mark Hamill voicework, which should lessen his appeal a bit. And the fact remains that outside of a traversal mechanic, mostly passive skill tree and an ultimate move, all Suicide Squad members share close to the same combat move set of melee, grenade and the same pool of guns.
There’s also the monetization question. Suicide Squad is doing what the (now dead) Avengers did by giving away heroes for free, while selling only a battle pass of cosmetics at launch. Player-friendly, to be sure, but one that does not seem poised to make a significant amount of revenue. A low playerbase will see a small portion return from its peak to play new live content like this. And an even smaller fraction will actually pay for something like a cosmetic battle pass if they can use Joker for free. So, good luck. Avengers did this and it failed miserably, though that game at least lasted for around two years of live content. Every single active player on Steam could buy that $10 battle pass and you’re earning $8,000 from an entire platform for an entire season. Normal numbers are more like 10% actually purchase things like battle passes, which would be a whopping $800.
The Roadmap
I remain skeptical that Suicide Squad will even last the year, that they’ll get through these first four seasons of live content. I think the game truly is performing that badly, and has received very poor post-launch support since its release including an utter lack of helpful balance patches and some players being locked entirely out of the game for close to two months.
This is it. If Joker doesn’t land, I think this game’s 2% chance to turn things around evaporates.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
