A few months after threatening to make a live service universe out of Warner Brothers IPs, David Zaslav is singing a different tune.
As reported on Variety and Forbes, Zaslav blamed the “disappointing release” of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, in part for WB Discovery’s losses in Q1. He said that the title generated “significantly lower” revenues than last year’s Hogwarts Legacy. This also reflects on the disparity for Q1 earnings year on year which dropped 12 % to $ 2.8 billion.
Zaslav says the game ultimately led to WB reporting an impairment charge. Wikipedia says an impairment is a “diminishing in quality, strength, amount, or value of an asset.” You don’t need to be an accountant to understand what that means.
This matches up to earlier reporting closer to Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s release, when Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels announced that it was falling short of expectations last February.
Now, we do want to be clear that as of this writing, we don’t know Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s budget, its ship through or sell through numbers, its total sales, or really, if it was profitable or not.
What we do know, and it is glaringly obvious, is that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is one of the most poorly critically received games of 2024, and gamers seem to be unanimous with critics on this. The game has Metacritic scores of 63 on PC, 61 on Xbox, and 60 on PlayStation. It received an OpenCritic rating of weak, with an average of 59 and only 19 % of reviewers recommending. Finally, SteamDB indicates player counts now in the 100s, way down from the 13,459 players it had at launch three months ago.
We have reported for many months on the behind the scenes issues for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and given the critical reception, there’s no need to dwell on that. It seems gamers should be concerned about this news as it does not bode well for the game’s developer, Rocksteady Studios.
As Matt McMuscles clearly explained in his What Happened? video on Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Rocksteady did not pitch this game to WB Games. Instead, the company created a mandate for a game to come alongside their push for Suicide Squad movies. Some fans with long memories may remember on their own that WB Games Montreal was assigned to make this game first, and it ended up with Rocksteady after their efforts petered out.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League changed Rocksteady so much that the studio’s founders and creative leads left before the title released. While gamers can see the effort and passion that the Batman Arkham studio put into this title, they may no longer be the same studio that made those games.
And what of Rocksteady’s future? Zaslav is a relatively new CEO at WB, and we don’t know if he would consider cutting this studio he has never heard of, because they failed to make money this one time.
As we now know, you can make an award winning, popular, and financially successful game, and a company as big as Sony, Microsoft, or Take-Two Interactive, will still fire you over profits. Rocksteady Studios is vulnerable right now, and we have to be alert on what could happen next.
