One of 2024's biggest live-service games, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, is sitting at less than 100 players two months later

Live-service games, as of 2024, are a dying breed, save a few already established IPs. And yet, we see publishers (especially in the AAA sphere) trying to cash in on the "live-service" or "games as a service" (GaaS) trend almost regularly, despite knowing the risks and sky-high failure rates of these multi-million dollar projects, which is genuinely baffling.

Take for instance one of 2024's most anticipated games, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, which is currently sitting at less than 100 players just two months following its release. At the time of writing, the game had just 90 active players on Steam, which, as you can guess, is an incredibly low count for a live-service title.

Let's take a look at how Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League went from one of 2024's most hyped titles to a complete failure for Warner Bros. Games. Spoilers! it's mostly because of an underwhelming story, bland characters, and forced live-service elements.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the author's opinions.

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Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League's failure demonstrates the risks associated with live-service games

Ever since it was announced, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League felt like a wrong move from WB Games and Rocksteady, especially after the phenomenal Batman Arkham Trilogy. A GaaS title from a studio predominantly known for its single-player craft wasn't something that was going to gel with most fans of the superhero genre.

Admittedly some fans (including me) were still optimistic about Suicide Squad given it had Rocksteady's name attached to it. However, come the game's release date, even those fans weren't enough to salvage the game's reputation.

Suicide Squad was not only a mediocre superhero game, but it was an awful GaaS as well. Even if you remove the painfully generic story, which is a direct continuation of the Arkhamverse (in case you missed that), you'll still be left with an incredibly mediocre third-person action game with nothing new or innovative to offer.

Upon its release, Suicide Squad was riddled with technical issues, most of them pertaining to the game's online connectivity, which is bizarre for a AAA live-service title. And even when the game seemingly worked as intended, it didn't feature anything that could retain player interest past the main story, which lasts roughly nine hours.

Even if you remove the online elements, the story of Suicide Squad isn't interesting enough to retain players (Image via Rocksteady Studios)

It also didn't help that the story in Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League is borderline nonsensical, which coming from Rocksteady, who were previously known for some of the best narratives in any superhero game to date, was genuinely jarring.

Apart from this, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League was panned by players for its extremely generic gameplay loop from the moment it was first showcased. And unsurprisingly, the game turned out almost exactly as most players expected, a bloated generic open-world title masquerading as a live-service game.

Many were hoping that the Season 1 update for the game would breathe some life into it, but apart from a minor surge in player counts to approximately 600-650 concurrent players, it didn't do much. It also didn't help that the game's live-service elements were incredibly lackluster, with nothing new to entice returning players.

Yes, there was a new playable character, the Joker, but to get access to said playable character, players were asked to either grind the same boring missions ad nauseam that they've already done countless times in the base game, or you know, shell out real-world cash in the game's microtransactions.

While live-service games were thriving back in 2016-2020, the AAA gaming landscape quickly became saturated by the sheer volume of GaaS titles, which eventually led to diminishing player interest. Live-service games live or die by their player counts.

Games like Suicide Squad, which cost millions to develop, need to sustain a healthy playerbase, not only to recoup the development costs but also to fund and bolster the "live-service promise." It's unlikely that Suicide Squad will ever make a comeback akin to No Man's Sky or FF14, but here's to hoping that it may one day do so.

Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League's current player count according to SteamDB (Image via SteamDB)

It's hard to say how long the game will be supported by Rocksteady, given WB Games has already confirmed that Suicide Squad wasn't a financial success. We've seen live-service games shut down just months after their release, look at Babylon's Fall, Marvel's Avengers, and Anthem. I won't be surprised if WB Games ends support for Suicide Squad right after the promised season finale, or perhaps even before that, considering almost no one is playing the game.

After all, developing new content for a title that's being played by less than 1000 players across all platforms isn't viable for a AAA studio or publisher.