Less than a month after a rough launch, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League already officially has a pessimistic outlook, per an earnings call from publisher Warner Bros Discovery.
“This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key video game releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comp in Q1,” CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels explained in the call.
The sweeping opinion of fans and critics alike, including here on MMORPG.com, seems to be that pushing live-service games as the primary platform has come at the detriment of the games themselves. Suicide Squad, in this case, came with a fantastic story but gameplay that fell terribly short due to its mandatory online nature, repetitive missions and poor matchmaking. This is on top of a series of delays that pushed the game quite far back.
It’s not that Warner Bros Discovery is a slew of failures by any means. The conglomerate has published an interesting mix of games throughout its history, including the F.E.A.R. series, Hitman games, Batman’s Arkham action-adventures, Injustice, and the Mortal Kombat games.
While Warner Bros. Discovery profits did fall about 6.6% year-by-year, the failed game wasn’t the main reason, per se. There was consistent performance from Hogwarts Legacy, including from its Nintendo Switch release, and the company is the first major Hollywood company at this point to turn a profit from streaming services. However, it had quite a few other disappointing projects, including poor returns for its advertising, so stock dropped nearly 10% throughout the day.
Ironically, one of the big outcries from this game was that shareholder expectations of games were ruining otherwise perfectly-decent games. There’s no hope of inward thinking here for a hot minute, though, given the context and glaring disappointment expressed.
