They may kill the Justice League in the game, but in real life, it’s the Suicide Squad that’s dead. PCGames reports that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the new DC Comics video game from Rocksteady, dropped to under 1000 players on Steam this morning. At 6:30 AM Eastern, only 945 gamers were playing Kill the Justice League just two and a half weeks into its release. The number went up later, with 1525 players at 12:30 PM Eastern, but that’s still abysmally small for something that was supposed to be the next big gaming hit – especially considering it’s a sequel to the Batman Arkham games, which were incredibly popular. (In fact, it’s made people appreciate the worst of the four.)
A bunch of Rocksteady people must be hiding their faces as they open their front doors to get the morning newspaper. There’s no way to paint Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as anything but a massive failure, with a new embarrassment emerging weekly. And while the story is getting the bulk of the attention, with humiliating deaths for some beloved DC Comics superheroes (who are not alternate-universe versions of the characters like in the Injustice games but the Batman, Superman, and Flash from the mainline DC Universe), the game was buggy as hell at launch, with a particular glitch giving players an automatic 100% completion rate as soon as they loaded it for the first time. Is it any wonder almost everyone has had enough? The next game Rocksteady releases had better be spectacular if they want to dig themselves out of this hole; if they start it with Bruce Wayne waking up from a nightmare and recalling the events of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, that may at least get a few smiles. (Better yet, the Joker: “I dreamed YOU killed the Bat!” before throwing Harley Quinn out a window or something.)