Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has cost WB $200 million

Rocksteady launched its live-service focused game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, back in February to negative reviews. Since then, the number of active players has plummeted and the game's first ‘season' of post-launch content has done nothing to move the needle.

Warner Bros executives had already stated it would be a ‘rough year' for its gaming business after the game's poorly received launch. Now following the game's first season, we have a clearer picture of the situation.

As part of WB's quarterly earnings report, sales of the game have been “disappointing”, adding that the game has “generated significantly lower revenues. In all, WB has taken a $200 million hit on Suicide Squad, undoing much of the good work they did in 2023 with the release of Hogwarts Legacy.

“1 total Adjusted EBITDA was $2,102 million, a 20% ex-FX decrease compared to the prior year quarter, primarily driven by the success of Hogwarts Legacy in the prior year quarter while Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League generated significantly lower revenues in the current year quarter”, the report says.

Despite the situation here showing that WB's strong IP can be leveraged well in the single player games market, as Hogwarts Legacy was a worldwide best-seller 12 months ago, WB still has its eyes on more live-service ventures in the future, with plans to create on-going ‘live' games for all its major franchises.

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KitGuru Says: Suicide Squad sounded like a disaster a year ago and the game's lengthy delay did little to help it in the long run. This is a situation of a poor idea being allowed to snowball out of control. However, unless Rocksteady can get a new project greenlit with market research that suggests a decent level of success, we could see WB shut the studio down. Many other studios have been killed off after similarly poor launches. 

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