Kill The Justice’ League On Sale For What It Should Have Cost In The First Place

If there are lessons to be learned from the massive success of Palworld and Helldivers, both priced around $40, it’s that demanding $70 up front for your live service game is probably not the best call in 2024. It doesn’t have to be free-to-play, which comes with its own problems, but onboarding players for half a game with the other half spread out over a year or two is not going great.

One obvious recent example of that is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And now, a month after release, it is on sale for 40% off on Steam, down to $42 from $70 in a sale that will last to March 21, a week before its new Joker expansion drops.

This is…probably what Suicide Squad should have cost in the first place. Yes, it was enormously expensive to make, but if you can sell more copies and earn more overall despite the lower price, you may want to do just that. Just because you max out prices that doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to earn more.

There has been a small tick up in Steam playercount since the sale went live, but yesterday it still peaked under 1,000 players. It is not currently on sale for Xbox or PlayStation, but the theory is that its playercounts on console may not be quite as desperate as what we’re seeing on Steam.

So, is it worth $40 right now? Even as someone who has about 75 hours into the game, really trying to give it a chance, I would still probably say no. Right now there is a risk you might still run into game-breaking bugs that don’t allow you to play at all, which has been the case with many players since launch and many are still not fixed. They still have not patched some of the game’s most obvious balance and quality of life issues. And now there is no reason to believe that the “live” aspects of the game are going to full play out to finish the story, or even that a year’s worth of planned content will make it out given how poorly it’s performing.

The game, to its credit, is not jamming microtransactions in right now, as it’s almost strange how few actual cosmetics have been for sale. Cosmetics are the only way it will earn money from its live content, as new missions and new characters like the upcoming Joker are free, and there will just be a cosmetic battle pass and store items. This is also, notably, how Marvel’s Avengers failed to make any real revenue, and we are in “but maybe it will for us” territory.

Will the sale help? I don’t know. It feels like there’s no saving the Steam population at this point. It started low and has crashed even from that. If the sale and Joker addition don’t move the needle, PC is lost entirely for this game.

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