By wasting Rocksteady’s pedigree and talent on live service guff, the quest to fatten dividends may have robbed us of a good Arkham follow-up.

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What on earth happened to Suicide Squad ? Alex and I discuss in the video above how Rocksteady’s long-awaited return to the Arkhamverse strays disappointingly far from the formula that made them a success story.

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We had some good times.

Yeah, that’s Marvel, but people are, if anything, even more weary of DC, whose abortive and fractured film universe has been floundering from the start. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is a rare bright spot, but as Alex notes, that interpretation of the character is wearing a bit thin now.

So on those terms, a Suicide Squad adaptation arriving years after two (or three, depending on your outlook) crap-to-mid movies doesn’t seem like the most nailed-on proposition. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. With talent like Rocksteady at the helm, and the killer concept of having to take down an alien-possessed Justice League, it actually could be something special. As long as they don’t do something stupid like turn it into a live service shooter, and release it into a market saturated with live service shooters.

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Audiences are familiar with this lot now. Maybe too much. |Image credit:WB Games

The Destiny-fication of everything is surely fed by the quest to fatten dividend payouts, rather than any creative decision making. There is certainly an argument to be made for the Suicide Squad as video game protagonists, with their distinct personalities and abilities. But from what we’ve seen of the gameplay, very little of this is leveraged outside of cutscenes. King Shark shoots guns. Boomerang shoots guns. Harley shoots guns. Spraying bullets into glowing purple damage spots as a four-piece is, frankly, tedious. And about a million miles away from the multi-faceted gameplay that people loved about the Arkham games.

Not that live service shooters are automatically bad. They’re certainly not without success: Destiny and Warframe prove that the model can be wildly successful, and critically acclaimed at that. But live-service games seem more notable for the genre’s failures than its successes, not least in a year when dozens of them were sunsetted in quick succession as it became clear that the market just wasn’t interested.

Shareholders, though, are addicted to trends. They demand growth, and because quality or innovation are risky bets for driving numbers up, the preferred way to satisfy demand for growth is to throw a dart at a list of current buzzwords and doggedly pursue whatever it lands on. For a while, it was toys-to-life. MOBAs. Hero Shooters. Eons ago, it was GTA clones. Whatever it happens to be at the time, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for creativity: some of the most brilliant games have emerged from a talented studio figuring out how to stuff concept Y into framework Z ( The Simpsons Hit & Run , we’ll never see its like again).

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Menus like this just make me want to go outside.

But the current live-service trend is a scourge, and rather rudely, it doesn’t even stay in its own lane as a thing that bubbles away in a corner while I can happily ignore it. Because single player games, long predicted to die out as it becomes more lucrative to jack people into vending machines for cosmetic hats that are cunningly disguised as co-op shooters, are becoming infected with this nonsense too. In the case of Suicide Squad, I heavily suspect, it has essentially robbed us of an Arkham follow-up that would have been, in fact, in the spirit of Arkham Asylum et al were it not for a business demand for the publisher to have its own version of That Thing.

Caveat: we haven’t played Suicide Squad yet. It could just be that they’ve chosen to show us the most uninspiring footage so far, for whatever reason. Maybe the shooting feels great. Maybe this will be a four-player co-op game that actually does play just as nicely in solo mode. We’ll have to wait and see. But experience tells us that it’s probably going to be dire, and once again, the ramifications of that will be painful for the industry as a whole.

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Batman: Arkham Asylum

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Batman: Arkham City

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Batman: Arkham Knight

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Batman: Arkham Origins

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PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

Wishlisted - Our 10 Best Steam Next Fest Demos

Another Next Fest kicks off soon, but we’ve already done the digging for you.

Welcome to Wishlisted, a showcase of our favourite demos from Steam Next Fest: June 2024. Check the video above or watch on YouTube .

Finding the Best NextFest Demos is all about the joy of discovery, but with so many Steam Next Fest demos getting released in such a short amount of time, it can be bewildering. So we’ve decided to show you our ten Best Steam Next Fest games which we think deserve your attention. These are all upcoming Steam Next Fest games that we’re genuinely excited for, and that we think should play nicely on PC handhelds too!

This is just the start of our Next Fest coverage. This week we’ll be previewing loads of upcoming demos across the entire network - right here on VG247, of course, but also over on our sister sites Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. Bookmark our Wishlisted Steam Fest hub to stay in the loop. And this is well before Next Fest actually starts, so you, dear reader, get to bask for a solid fortnight celebrating all the wonderful new games that are just around the corner. Enjoy!