Warner Brothers has reported significant financial losses within its gaming division over the last quarter, largely attributed to the substantial commercial disappointment of the Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League live service game, developed in partnership with Sweet Baby Inc.
Warner Brothers gained prominence recently with their single-player focused Hogwarts Legacy, which faced criticism and scrutiny from activists on social media. They claimed the game was promoting a supposed “trans genocide,” regarding the “controversial” views of Harry Potter author JK Rowling regarding basic biology.
Activists campaigned for a boycott of the game, harassing and insulting streamers who played it. Geoff Keighley’s commercially driven ESG award ceremony outright ignored the game. However, their boycott ended in a resounding failure, as Hogwarts Legacy sold over 22 million units in 2023, surpassing even Activision’s Call of Duty in annual sales.
An achievement in its own right. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, the higher you climb, the harder you fall.
Following Hogwarts Legacy, Warner Bros experienced a significant downfall, lacking any grace. Their launch of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League by Rocksteady Studio proved to be a disastrous failure, tarnishing the legacy of the critically acclaimed Arkham Verse.
By enlisting Sweet Baby Inc for consultancy, they injected the game’s narrative and character designs with blatant progressive propaganda. Graphically, the game fell short, appearing inferior to titles released a decade earlier.
Even the iconic Harley Quinn suffered, depicted through a lens of ESG-approved aesthetics, resulting in a notable decline in her femme-fatale portrayal by depicting her as being flat and masculine.
The game’s narrative is saturated with progressive rhetoric, while its live service model is marred by microtransactions. Needless to say, the game failed to connect with audiences beyond devoted fans of the franchise who seemingly never experienced the Arkham series before.
Sales were dismal, and it quickly plummeted to below a thousand peak concurrent players on Steam just weeks after its launch.
And today? It struggles to surpass 150 players. Remarkably, even erotic games and visual novels seem to maintain larger player bases on average than Suicide Squad has managed to achieve after just three months.
Introducing a flamboyant and potentially homosexual depiction of the Joker didn’t aid matters either, so it’s hardly shocking that during their latest quarterly earnings report, Warner Bros pointed fingers at Suicide Squad for their substantial financial losses. Warner Brothers CEO, David Zaslav, disclosed that the studio’s revenue plunged by 12% year-over-year to $2.8 Billion.
Warner Bros. attributes the significant downturn to a notably lower Games revenue. In a subsequent call geared towards investors, Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav labeled the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as “disappointing,” while Warner Bros. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels outlined an impairment charge incurred by the company due to the game’s failure.
“In terms of Studios, the decline of over $400 million year-over-year in Q1 was primarily a result of the challenging comparison we faced in the gaming sector against the success of Hogwarts Legacy last year in the first quarter, coupled with the underwhelming performance of Suicide Squad released this past quarter, which we had to impair. This led to a $200 million impact on EBITDA during the first quarter,” Wiedenfels explained. EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
The actual sales figures of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League remain undisclosed, but judging by the rapid and aggressive price drops of physical copies for both major consoles shortly after release, it’s likely to be disappointingly low.
SteamDB estimates that over 100,000 copies were sold, but given the current trend of only around 150 concurrent players, this seems dubious. As I previously mentioned regarding the last seasonal update, any content in active development up to that point will likely be released as planned.
However, it’s highly probable that Warner Bros. has shelved any plans for Rocksteady to pitch or develop new content at this point in time already, meaning it’s only a matter of time before the game itself is declared end-of-life.
Suicide Squad appears destined to follow the path of Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers. As an always-online live service title, once Warner Bros. pulls the plug on the game’s servers, it will become unplayable, the same cannot be said regarding Marvel’s Avengers.
