Suicide Squad Pulls In 3,000 Concurrent Steam Players With Joker Update

thegamer.com:

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's first season is live now, introducing the Joker as a playable character. Since being available to anyone with the base game, the season has resulted in a small increase in the playerbase, although nowhere near the figures it pulled in at launch.

According to SteamDB, the Suicide Squad playerbase on Steam peaked at 3,042 concurrent players on Thursday, before falling to about half that over the weekend. It's still an improvement on the usual figures, which were regularly in the 500s, but it's still quite low for a live service that only launched a few weeks ago.

At the time of writing, 1,518 users are playing via Steam. The 24-hour peak is 1,713, down from its all-time peak of 13,459. Now, the player count is once again on a downward trajectory, struggling to pull in fans over the Easter weekend.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is, of course, available on both Xbox and PlayStation too. However, this player count is still likely to be below expectations for PC. We already know that Warner Bros. Discovery considers the game a disappointment, saying that its sales have "fallen short" of expectations. It also seems to have influenced the company's strategy going forward, as its head of streaming and gaming announced it would be moving away from the "volatile" console games market, instead focusing on live service mobile games.

As for the Suicide Squad update itself, it added the first seasonal event to the game, but also came under fire in the fanbase. Players complained that unlocking the Joker as a playable character is far too grindy, requiring them to replay through old content. If you want to skip the grind, you can purchase him for $10, but that's never going to be a popular move for a game that already costs £69.99 to pick up in the first place. Some feel that the grind was made tedious on purpose to encourage players to just pay the $10, something fans aren't happy about at all.

We'll have to see if developer