Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League premiered a lot of gameplay at last month’s PlayStation State of Play, and when it became clear that developer Rocksteady Studios was going full-throttle into live-service elements that lacked the imagination of its Batman Arkham series, the backlash was swift and vocal. Apparently, Rocksteady is taking that harsh criticism and disappointment to heart, as according to Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, Rocksteady has internally delayed Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League indefinitely. The game was supposed to launch on May 26, and Rocksteady and Warner Bros. have yet to publicly confirm the delay.
Anonymous sources relayed the delay news to Bloomberg, but the specific cause for the delay was not stated. Still, it isn’t difficult to imagine that the overwhelmingly negative reception to the State of Play footage played a major factor in the decision. Yet it’s not even that Kill the Justice League looks like a bad game — rather, it just looks frustratingly similar to many other live-service games. And a lot of live-service games have been dropping dead lately because there just isn’t a large enough player pool to support all these games in the first place. It leads one to wonder what error-ridden math these executives are using that they keep thinking these games are a good idea.
It remains to be seen what changes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League might undergo after being delayed without a new release date, but de-emphasizing some of the live-service elements and doing more to express the gameplay individuality of the characters could go a long way toward winning public support back. That being said, that would require large-scale changes, and as Schreier has noted separately, it’s likely that the delay is more to just put polish on the systems already in place. In any case, the game is still expected to launch sometime this year.
