Rocksteady's 'Suicide Squad' game sinks to an all-time low player base, which doesn't bode well for the game's future

What you need to know

• Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has reached an all-time low record of 118 concurrent players on Steam according to SteamDB.
• Compared to other live service games like Helldivers 2 and Fallout 76 which have tens of thousands of concurrent players, this record does not paint a pretty picture of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's future.
• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a live service, loot shooter that launched in February 2024 and was critically panned by critics for its lackluster story and characterization, repetitive gameplay, and huge heapings of microtransactions and Battle Pass confusion.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League just can't catch a break. Even since this live service looter-shooter from Rocksteady Studios launched back in February 2024, it has been bombarded with harsh criticism from fans and critics for repetitive gameplay, heavy amounts of microtransactions, and disappointing story-telling and characterization.

To compound the game's poor critical reception, SteamDB has shown that the concurrent player base for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has sunk to an all-time low of 118 players.

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The above chart represents the game's player base since it launched, which has quickly gone downhill these past couple of months, only getting a small bump in players when the Season 1 update with The Joker was added. While this chart doesn't represent its total player base as SteamDB doesn't factor in Xbox or PlayStation, it's certainly an indicator that things are not looking good for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

For the sake of comparison, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is being outshined by other live-service titles like Helldivers 2 and Fallout 76, which are enjoying huge amounts of concurrent players at this moment with over 30,000 players for Fallout 76 and over 84,000 for Helldivers 2.

Helldivers 2 has trailblazed the live service game, being a surprise hit that caught everyone off guard with its polished gameplay, consumer-friendly microtransactions, and a never-ending stream of content updates. Meanwhile, Fallout 76 has boosted in popularity thanks to the Fallout TV show (which we reviewed and loved) renewing interest in the Fallout franchise and over half of a decade of content updates that have maintained player interest despite its rocky launch in 2018.

To get an idea of what Suicide Squad's future might look like, you could consider Marvel's Avengers by Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics. Marvel's Avengers had similar problems to that of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to some degree, yet has proved vastly more successful, reaching a peak record of 31,165 concurrent players in 2020 according to SteamDB. Despite that, it was still shut down by Crystal Dynamics in 2023 after being deemed a commercial failure. 

By comparison, Suicide Squad's current peak record number of concurrent players was 13,459 in February 2024 and has plummeted much faster than Marvel's Avengers playbase. In short: these numbers paint a short and grim future for this game's lifespan.

Perhaps most damning at all: despite being officially dead, Marvel's Avengers currently has more concurrent players than Suicide Squad as of writing, albeit a couple of dozen players here or there. 

Much like their missions, the Suicide Squad's game was destined for disaster from the start

I feel sorry for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and its developers Rocksteady Studios. The idea of playing as villains in the DC universe wasn't necessarily a bad one and when we reviewed of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it turned out better than we were expecting. It had a decent balance of story and action, the warped and demented personalities of the Suicide Squad were endearing, and combat had a variety of entertaining mechanics to play with.

Sadly, a disastrous early-access launch coupled with expensive microtransactions, battle passes that required you to grind dozens of missions to unlock content (namely The Joker in the Season 1 update), a lack of substantial endgame post-game content, and many other spoiler factors regarding its story, has caused the game to fail winning over its critics. It was such a departure from what Rocksteady is known and celebrated for, which has been jarring from every direction. 

It's my firm hope that Rocksteady Studios will be able to bounce back from this and maybe turn things around to give us a No Man's Sky-esque redemption arc for the game. Otherwise, the best thing alternative option I can think of is for Rocksteady to cut their losses on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and work on a new project that isn't plagued by live-service misgivings and lives up to its legacy of producing the best Xbox titles based on superheroes like the Batman: Arkham series.