Usually when you’re trying to sell a product, you want to make it look like best deal in town, but Warner Bros. apparently didn’t get the memo. Each passing day makes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League look worse, but there may be a silver lining behind all the PR madness.
Suicide Squad’s entire concept sounds like it was deliberately designed to turn people off. It’s a full-price live-service game with a seasonal release approach that’s practically guaranteed to delve into microtransactions, as they’re inherently tied to the live-service model.
If that wasn’t enough, Warner Bros. just took things a step further, restricting any and all pre-launch reviews of Suicide Squad by refusing to send out review codes until the servers go live—something that won’t happen until launch day. This means no one will be able to properly review it until at least a couple days after it’s out for everyone to purchase.
It’s not like pre-orders aren’t a thing already, but not preventing reviews prior to release is widely regarded as the clearest red flag there is—the logic being that if your game is any good, you’d want reviewers to make that known ahead of launch, so more people take notice and purchase your product.
There’s no denying this bizarre PR campaign is making Suicide Squad look like a guaranteed disaster. Maybe not Lord of the Rings: Gollum levels of disaster, but a disaster nonetheless. But in spite of everything, I’ll try to be the positive guy in the room.
Even though Suicide Squad looks like it’ll live up to its name by committing PR suicide before it’s even out, there’s a silver lining: We already know exactly what to expect, and can make an educated decision about whether to buy it based on the information kindly provided by Warner Bros’ PR team.
We can’t accuse the publisher or developer of lying or deception, and we can’t claim we were let down, because let’s be real, the expectations for Suicide Squad are lower than grass right now. It’s just us, our wallet, and a game that has to convince us the hard way that it’s worth getting our wallets involving at all. In a way, the pre-launch campaign did gamers a favor. Now, we can go into Suicide Squad with zero expectations, and at the worst, have our expectations confirmed. Best case scenario, we get a much better product than Warner Bros. is making it out to be.
Suicide Squad only has one direction to go from here, and that’s up. Would we have preferred a great product straight-up, with no caveats and no need to look for silver linings? Obviously, yes, but it’s better to have a good game following bad PR than a flawless PR campaign promoting a dud. I’m rooting for Suicide Squad to defy the odds, because having one more enjoyable game to play is always a net positive for the gaming world, regardless of how it looks pre-launch.
