To be honest, I haven't laid eyes on "Suicide Squad": take down Justice League! 's Steam numbers for a while; I've been busy with "Shadow of the Erdtree" and, today, "Final Fantasy 14.

Rocksteady's ill-fated live-service shooter had mostly slipped my mind, and with fellow PC Gamer writer Morgan Park assuring me that it was "harmless middling fun by all accounts," it was drawing a modest but respectable audience there I had assumed that it would. Certainly too modest to make up for the $200 million loss, but enough to keep the wheels turning.

But holy cow. Things are much worse than I could have imagined. [Looking at SteamDB stats for the past three months, "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" has been steadily declining from a still not-so-great 2,700 players in March; by the end of April, only 170 people were playing on Steam By the end of April, only 170 people were playing on Steam. In May, when Season 1 Episode 2 appeared, the number rose again to about 500, but quickly returned to almost Hamlet-sized numbers. At the time of this writing, the 24-hour peak was 210 people. This is about the same as "Gotham Knights," a similar faux-pas that appeared a full two years ago. [To be honest, aside from big hits like "Helldivers 2" and, inexplicably, "Banana," which are clearly noteworthy by any measure, I don't like to lay out Steam's numbers as uncritically pessimistic and devastating evidence. So, to be fair, here are the obvious caveats.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a multi-platform game; it is available on PS5, Xbox Series X, and S, and is also available on the Epic Games Store. Not everyone playing this game will be playing it on Steam, and the overall numbers are probably not that bad.

Nevertheless, given the aforementioned $200 million loss, things are looking bad. The game stopped "weekly" developer updates last month, with the last post being on May 31.

Heading to the Discord, the community atmosphere seems more like a wake than a village. One player asked, "I hate to say this, but would it be a good idea to get back into the game?" The short answer is no." Another player later says, with the air of a violinist on the Titanic: "I'm not sure I want to be back in the game, but I'm not sure I want to be back in the game.

Look, I have mixed critical feelings about what this game means for the industry, and moving away from what Rocksteady does best and into this five-years-late, hopeless live service nonsense is a shame, as our own Robin Valentine would have had us say so, and it has been frustrating. The past year of terrible layoffs has reminded me once again that the desire to dig a gold mine will always crush a decent studio full of talented people to smithereens. It is not enough to make good-selling games; the line must go up and up and up.

As a game, "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League": as a game, "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" ruthlessly puts talented individuals out of work, "We can make Fortnite, maybe!" is the epitome of bland corporate optimism. But to be fair, the same report that highlighted the $200 million loss also lays the blame at the feet of the studio's co-founders.

But at the same time, the guys are having a rough time. Just because I don't like a person doesn't mean I want to see that person suffer.

Nor do I want the games that exist - the art assets, the voice acting, the scripts all - to simply disappear off the face of the earth simply because someone decides they need to be like Destiny, no matter how controversial it may be. It doesn't have to be a game worth preserving. Fortunately, the game should have an offline mode added to it, and you can even get it now for about 30% of the original asking price. Any betting man will tell you that in a few years it will be even cheaper.