Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a game Warner Bros. had high hopes for. However, it failed to meet anyone’s expectations: the publisher’s, Rocksteady’s, and most of all – fans’. Moreover, it has become one of the biggest flops for both companies, costing Warner Bros. $200 million, as revealed in Bloomberg’s new report. So what went wrong?
According to the people working on the game, it was a bunch of reasons, including a constantly changing vision, a poor choice of genre, and “a culture of rigid perfectionism” as Bloomberg calls it.
Soon after the game’s release, Warner Bros. expressed its disappointment with how it performed, especially considering last year’s Hogwarts Legacy success. The company’s Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav said that Kill the Justice League “overshadowed” the rest of the quarter. So grave was the failure that rumor has it the game will be shut down in 2025. Truly sad news for the developer Rocksteady, loved for its Batman: Arkham.
Rocksteady Studios
The development of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League wasn’t easy; the direction changed multiple times and the game met delays. The vision for it switched several times: it was once supposed to be focused on melee combat but then guns and live service started to look more appealing to the management.
Speaking of which, the report claims that the developers sometimes had to wait weeks or months for Sefton Hill, Rocksteady’s “perfectionist co-founder” and director of the game, to review their work, which slowed the development further.
“He scrapped big chunks of the script and struggled to convey his evolving ideas, [Bloomberg’s sources] said, confessing that he hadn’t spent much time with competing games such as Destiny. The constant delays hurt morale and led staff to fret that they were discarding too much and failing to make real progress.”
The biggest problem was that Rocksteady was used to working with single-player games, and a multiplayer live-service one was not something they were experienced with. The team reportedly struggled with developing the game and making it less tedious and repetitive for the player.
When they voiced their concerns to the management, it promised that “Suicide Squad would eventually coalesce at the last minute” (and we know how it usually goes) as the Arkham games had. Some employees used the term “toxic positivity” to describe the company’s culture, which didn’t want to hear any criticism. The management just didn’t seem to be worried.
At the same time, Warner Bros. kept praising the demos that were brought to them and expected Suicide Squad to become a billion-dollar franchise.
Rocksteady Studios
Then one day, Rocksteady’s co-founders left the studio, and the change in leadership shook the workers. Later, when they started a new studio Hundred Star Games, they told their former colleagues that they would have the opportunity to make a game “free of the mandates and pressures from a corporation like Warner Bros.”
All of these troubles resulted in the subpar Kill the Justice League. According to Bloomberg, many of Rocksteady’s employees are now helping to develop a director’s cut version of Hogwarts Legacy, a much more successful game in Warner Bros.’s portfolio. What’s more, the studio leaders are looking to pitch a new single-player game, which should return Rocksteady to its roots.
