Batman: Arkham Knight sees impressive spike in player count on Steam, surpassing Suicide Squad in daily CCU

The number of active players in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has quickly dropped on Steam. It now has fewer concurrent users than Batman: Arkham Knight, Rocksteady’s previous game released nine years ago.

As spotted by Forbes, the launch of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League caused a huge spike in player interest for Batman: Arkham Knight.  The game’s player count has increased by 78% over the past 30 days: it averaged 2,101 concurrent users (CCU) per day on Steam and peaked at 5,011 CCU on February 11 (via SteamDB).

For comparison, Suicide Squad’s 24-hour peak was 4,797 concurrent players. At the moment of writing, Kill the Justice League has just a little over 2,300 CCU, while Arkham Knight has over 3,400 CCU. So it is interesting to see Rocksteady’s nine-year old game beating its new release on this metric.

It is also worth noting that Arkham Knight had an all-time peak of 27.4k CCU — double that of Kill the Justice League.

Of course, we don’t have data on Suicide Squad’s player count on Xbox and PlayStation, which may make up the majority of its user base. However, the Steam numbers alone can still give an idea of its overall no-so-great performance in terms of player interest, at least.

When it comes to sales, the potential success of Kill the Justice League is also a concern. Although the game debuted at #1 on the UK boxed charts, it only ranked 10th among Steam’s weekly top sellers by gross revenue. It was behind other new releases like Persona 3 Reload and Granblue Fantasy: Relink.

None of this is to say that Warner Bros will 100% deem Suicide Squad a flop, as the company has yet to disclose official numbers, but it is definitely not a good sign given the game’s live service ambitions.

We have seen a number of GaaS-type releases from AAA publishers trying to make games that will provide them with a constant, recurrent revenue stream. And as sad as it is to say this, the launch of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn’t look promising — especially compared to Helldivers 2, a co-op shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios and PlayStation, which has already peaked at over 155k concurrent players on Steam alone.