When ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Diablo IV’ started to be sold not only as games, but as endless services to which to continue adding content over the years, many producers began to rub their hands thinking about the possibilities. And since then, they have only occasionally hit the mark. The “game as a service” is a wrapper that holds great successes, yes, but also terrible failures that we are seeing day by day. The latest one, the Rocksteady game meant to replace the Arkham series, has only accumulated misfortunes: ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’.
Bat-failure
From the beginning, Rocksteady has refused to classify their game as a service, claiming that it is something completely different. But once the cat is out of the bag, and seeing that the current selling experience only lasts nine hours (waiting for more content to arrive), we will say that it is closer to the legacy of ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ than to that of ‘Fortnite’.
Well, in fact, the game of Marvel had more luck than this one. To give some data: while that one crashed, at least in the week of its release it had up to 31,165 people playing at the same time. The Suicide Squad game, on the other hand, has barely reached 13,459 as a peak… And dropping.
To get an idea of what these numbers mean, ‘Palworld’ has around one million daily players and at its peak it reached two million. At the time of writing the article, ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’ is ranked 191st among the most played games on Steam, below others like ‘Marvel Snap’, ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ or even ‘Plants vs Zombies’. Phew.
There can be many reasons for its failure, such as “superhero fatigue”, but it is inevitable to blame the famous “games as a service”. Considering that the public has stuck with the idea of “battle passes”, it doesn’t matter what objections they may have. If something is white and tastes like milk, it’s usually milk.
And it’s time for all those who had planned their games with “later expansions” to start trembling, even if it’s just a little. Currently, 65% of studios are making a game as a service… Aware that the chances of getting rich are not many and, in fact, it is very likely that, seeing the speed at which the game from DC is being returned, they will all end up losing a lot (more) money.
And maybe it’s not such a good idea to bury the simple game, without the need for add-ons or season passes, ahead of time, because the same thing will happen as with Netflix and its competitors: we can pay for one, two or three. But at the moment when everyone wants to profit and make us pay for every party and every event month by month, we end up not wanting tickets anymore. Today it was the Suicide Squad, but it looks like many more will fall soon. It’s the law of life.
