Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League didn’t, by most metrics, do what it was supposed to. On paper, it was meant to spin up Rocksteady’s pedigree of Batman games into a multiversal live service, aiming for a piece of the pie that games like Fortnite have been scarfing down for years.
In practice, it fell short of expectations, lost Warner Bros Entertainment $200 million, and struggles even now to gather more than 200 concurrents on Steam. As I write, only 56 people are playing it on Valve’s platform (though doubtless there are more elsewhere).
Things have gone from bad to worse. As reported by Eurogamer, Rocksteady has begun to lay off over half of its QA department with, as the report states, “poor sales of Suicide Squad directly cited as a reason”. This would bring the department down from 33 members to 15.
Staff proceeded to inform the site that there’d be more layoffs coming, with one member stating they were laid off during their paternity leave—fortunately, Rocksteady is based in the UK, which means said employee should be receiving the rest of their leave regardless of their unemployment status.
Anonymous staff members also expressed concerns that these cuts to the QA department would “leave their remaining colleagues shouldered with more work”, and that senior management is already expecting the quality of future Rocksteady games to “suffer as a result.”
This is all pretty frustrating to hear, even if it’s not unexpected. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was some unfairly maligned darling that deserved better. It was a pretty bad idea from the outset, especially with a Bloomberg report from earlier this year painting a damning picture of a development journey that seemed indecisive about the game’s mechanics and hampered by unfocused, tardy leadership.
There’s nothing I can really add here that hasn’t been repeated time and time again, like with the bleak closure of Arkane Austin after Redfall. Everyone wants to make a live service, because live service games make bank when they hit—but those pulls on the metaphorical slot machine are downright wasteful. Of industry talent, of their work, and of the games that could have been.
