DC’s Most Anticipated Game Is Getting Another Crushing Delay
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which was supposed to come out in May, has been changed to "later this year."
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League just got another crushing delay from its planned May release date. It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time the Suicide Squad game was delayed, but the bad news is just one of many that have upset fans of this upcoming co-op online action shooter from Rocksteady. The game’s new official date reads “later this year.”
According to Bloomberg, the delay isn’t a reason for concern, as Warner Bros. and Rocksteady Games—the game’s developer and publisher, respectively—listed final polishing as the reason behind the longer wait. It’s worth noting that the game was previously announced in 2020 and scheduled to come out in 2022, but it received several delays along the way before being pushed to a new but pretty vague release window. But there’s perhaps more than meets the eye here, and final polishing might be only one of the reasons for the delay.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was featured at Sony’s State of Play, with Warner Bros. and Rocksteady offering players an extended gameplay demo. Unfortunately, the demoed gameplay didn’t sit well with the crowds because of its live-service approach, and a backlash ensued. The gaming community’s concern regarding this is well justified considering what happened to Marvel’s Avengers only two years after the game launched.
The games-as-a-service (GaaS) approach means that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will be rendered unplayable in offline mode and may even cause gameplay disruptions, character data losses, etc. if any server-side issues occur. But the main concerns actually lie with the game’s longevity. Most GaaS titles lose the support of their publishers and developers as soon as they stop generating revenue, at which point even the physical copies of the games—which are getting more expensive—become nothing more than a hyped-up paperweight.
We’re not saying that might happen to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but you have to wonder just how the game would generate enough revenue to justify server expenditure. The answer is microtransactions, which usually imply paywalls, as was the case with Diablo Immortal, or various cosmetics that are so pointless that they might not cover the game’s running costs. So, without any patch that would enable offline play, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League could suffer the same fate as many GaaS games that came before it.
However, WB stated that the live-service approach of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League wouldn’t change, implying that the delay wasn’t caused by the backlash. And that might be true after all—it’s quite possible that the company is delaying the game to implement final polishing. WB can most definitely afford to delay the game with the purpose of delivering a finished product—which is as rare as a real-life rainbow unicorn nowadays—considering that its pockets will remain lined by the revenue generated by Hogwarts Legacy.
In fact, it makes no sense for WB to launch two highly-anticipated AAA gaming titles back-to-back and cause sales disruptions in either. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is currently delayed to late 2023—the exact release date remains unknown.
