A new report details that Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Games have a huge disaster on their hands with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
A scene from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
Christopher Dring at Games Industry reports that the latest Games Sales Data chart out of Europe, which tracks both physical and digital sales for most AAA publishers that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did not chart in the top 10 of sales for the month of February.
The game placed 12th in the month and Dring reported that its sales in its first five weeks of release were 33% lower than Gotham Knights in 2022 and 61% lower than Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy in 2021.
Superman in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
Interestingly, Square Enix President and Representative Director Yosuke Matsuda reported that Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy failed to meet the company’s sales expectations. In a financial results briefing for the third quarter of 2022, Matsuda said, “Despite strong reviews, the game’s sales on launch undershot our initial expectations. However, sales initiatives that we kicked off in November 2021 and continued into the new year have resulted in sales growth, and we intend to work to continue to expand sales to make up for the title’s slow start.”
Crystal Dynamics CEO Phil Rogers shared in November that the game had reached over 8 million players. He said, “Our award-winning Guardians of the Galaxy just celebrated its first anniversary and with that we passed the 8 million player count. Now, we’ve seen great engagement from gamers with this title entering into Game Pass and PlayStation+ quite recently.”
According to Steam Charts the game had an all-time peak number of players of 9,826.
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Steam Charts
As for Gotham Knights, the reported data is a little more vague. The game was second on the UK sales charts when it released in October 2022. It was bested by FIFA 23.
The game sold 3,125 physical units for PlayStation 5 in Japan in the week of its release according to Famitsu. That was best for the 13th best selling retail game of the week in Japan.
According to Steam Charts it had an all-time peak concurrent players of 23,923.
Gotham Knights Steam Charts
Given this reporting that the sales are much worse than both Gotham Knights and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s quite likely Warner Bros. comments about the game performing poorly were an understatement.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said on the company’s fourth quarter 2023 earnings webcast in February, “On the theatrical and gaming side while we did have some real misses this year, we also had some really big wins including Barbie, the number one movie globally and the most successful movie in the history of Warner Bros., and Hogwarts Legacy, the biggest game of 2023.”
Later in the earnings webcast, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels admitted, “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.”
Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
The game had an all-time high of 13,459 players, but quickly fell off with less than 1,000 players playing concurrently over the past 24 hours.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Steam Charts
The game is also the subject of a boycott due to the involvement of consultant Sweet Baby Inc. The game is part of the Steam curator list Sweet Baby Inc detected that lists all of the games Sweet Baby Inc. has been involved with that are available to purchase on Steam.
The curator list is followed by nearly 300,000 gamers.
Sweet Baby Inc detected curator list
What do you make of this report on how poor Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League performed?
