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If a live service game reveals a great plot twist but no one is around to see it, does it really exist? That’s what’s currently happening with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which revealed that his Justice League weren’t actually killed at all, but instead were replicas, with the real ones waiting to be rescued. First, The Flash, next? It has Superman, Batman and Green Lantern for free. Tough luck, Wonder Woman.

But tracking Suicide Squad’s continued determination to finish out its four-season run is… bleak. Now that Season 2 has launched, we can see how it performed on Steam at least. PlayStation only shows us its top 10 games, and Xbox its top 50, and obviously doesn’t rank on either of those lists. More recently on Steam, the launch of Season 2 only garnered 572 peak players, just a little more than double the roughly 200 that were left before launch, with some occasional small spikes when the game went on sale.

This is, perhaps predictably, going in a different way than Joker’s season opener, which didn’t shoot things up to a healthy level, but was up around 600% at the end of March. But even those who gave this season a chance back then are gone. Including me as I recently uninstalled the game to make room for others on my SSD.

Part of the problem was the release of a character no one wanted to play, Ms. Freeze, a gender-reversed version of the Batman villain, aka not the one we fought repeatedly in the Arkham series. She arrives with the same problem, a frozen wife in need of help, and even with a great ice surfing ability, she was never going to resonate as much as the Joker. Not that people even liked the alternate universe Joker that much. I fear the same problem will arise with Zoe Lawton, Deadshot’s daughter, next season, as she’s more of a supporting character than a gallery villain. The only announced character that players are looking forward to is Deathstroke in season 4.

You can see the plan here, which assumes that Suicide Squad will be a hit and be able to tell its entire story over the course of several years. But the problem there was that it had to cut off its main campaign around the middle to bury the live reveals later. There were indications that we didn’t kill off the real Justice League during the main game, just little hints and no direct revelations. This only happened now with the revival of the “real” Flash.

The logical end point of this is that the evil Arkham Batman dies no the last we see of Arkham Batman after all. Fans complained that this was coming off as a low point for both the star of the Arkham games and departed voice actor Kevin Conroy, where it was part of his last work as Batman in any medium. We don’t know that if Batman returns, Conroy has voiced new lines ahead of time.

I’d actually like to know what the overall story is here, which will now have to end in a year since there won’t be a second one with these numbers. If the game grows its player count at all, it’s because of deep discounts or direct giveaways across multiple platforms. I’ve said it’s worth playing cheap or free just for some of the fighting and building, but it’s far from a cohesive whole.

This season is performing as I expected, though maybe even a little worse. I respect them moving forward, but I just don’t think it makes any real sense and it would be wise to postpone that day and move on to other projects at this stage.

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