As a game reviewer who is often at the mercy of embargoes, I’ve always found the ‘paid early access’ ruse particularly distasteful. Warner Bros., and every other publisher that sells the opportunity to buy a deluxe edition and play a new game a few days early, is being completely dishonest in its 😼marketing. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League does not launch February 2, it launched January 29 when it w🐻ent on sale. It’s the full game: fully playable, purchasable and downloaded. We need to stop thinking about these early access ploys as a benefit to eager players and recognize that publishers use these deluxe editions to bilk their most loyal fans while providing cover for launch issues, like the one affecting Suicide Squad.
For publishers, these deluxe editions are a win/win. They get to charge a huge premium for new games, and their customers will thank them for the opportunity. Those same customers - the most ravenous, dedicated Rocksteady/Suicide Squad fans who are willing to shell out $100 to play the game ‘early&🅺rsquo; - are also the first line of defense when something goes wrong. Any kind of bugs, server issues, or major malfunctions are readily dismissed by the exact same people that are getting screwed over. “It’s only early access”, they’ll say, fully convinced by the marketing machine that they haven’t been taken for a ride.
Suicide Squad Is Marvel's Avengers All Over Again
The live🐽 ser🌠vice bubble has long burst, so what hope does Rocksteady's new game have?
This little semantics game also gives publishers the leeway to clamp down on negative reviews. When it comes to these sort of early access shenanigans, reviewers typically have to abide by two different embargoes: one that lifts in at♐ the start of early access and another that lifts once the game officially launches. It’s not uncommon for reviews to be embargoed until after early access begins, so people are buying the game before anyone has had a chance to review it. For Suicide Squad that’s neither here nor there, since no reviewers have even had a chance to play the game before early access began.
Whether Suicide Squad’s bravest soldiers want to admit it or not, its r🔯ocky launch proves exactly why this entire early access charade needs to end. When the game launched in New Zealand, there was a bug that caused some people to launch the game with the story already completed, forcing Rocksteady to take the servers down shortly after the early access window started. The downtime lasted hours, while all the pre-order rubes were forced to watch as the value of their deluxe edition went down the drain.
Launch issues are common, especially among online games like Suicide Squad (I’ll get back to that, don’t you worry). People expect to run into some server and stability issues at luanch, and reasonable people will give the devs some grace to sort out the teething issues. The problem when it comes to early access is that they’re selling people time they can’t actually provide. It’s not as though the ‘launch’ of Suicide Squad on F🐻eb 2 is going to get delayed to ensure the early access customers get what they paid for. Every minute that the servers were down was a minute that deluxe edition customers were paying for nothing. It’s not 72 hours of early access, its 72-x, where x is the time it takes the studio to fix all the problems that, not for nothing, probably would have been caught ahead of time if reviewers had been allowed to review the g🦋ame early.
Plenty of early access customers will come to Suicide Squad's defense on that issue, but that doesn't justify this dishonest practice and, in fact, it just speaks to Warner Bros. willingness to take advantage of its most loyal fans. Whether players agree or not, they deserve better.
There may be some calling for partial refunds, to which I’ll point you to Suicide Squad’s : Next to the 72-hour early launch access line is an asterisk that reads “Actual play time depends on purchase date and is subject to possible outages and applicable time zone differences.” These publishers already know there’s 𝓰an inherent problem with sel🐷ling time, but that isn’t going to stop them from doing it.
Of course, Suicide Squad’s situation wouldn’t be as bad if it wasn’t an always-online ga💖me. Rocksteady would still be scrambling to release a patch that fixed the issue for those affected, but it wouldn’t have had to lock everyone else out of the game too. Who knows if this will even be the last time the servers have to be taken offline to fix an issue. It’s happened to Destiny 2 countless times over the years, and it will probably happen to Suicide Squad again. Rocksteady says an offline mode is coming, and this is probably a good sign to wait to pick this game up until it does.
I’m only singling out Suicide Squad because it’s the most recent example, but this has been popular among triple-A for the last five years. All the biggest games last year, including Call of Duty, Hogwarts Legacy, and Baldur’s Gate 3 used this scheme to sell pre-orders or upsell players into more expensive versions of the game. This is one of the most dishonest common practices in gaming today, but it's never going to change unless we stop buying into it. At the very least we can change the way we talk about it. This isn’t paying for early access, it's getting discounted for waiting.