Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong, two developers on Rocksteady Studios’ 2024 game “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,” have shared some of their experience with the infamously failed title’s troubled development and how it almost led to them quitting the video game industry.
The game was a famed disaster, drawing poor reviews and was a commercial failure, with Rocksteady owner Warner reportedly taking a $200 million loss on the game.
The title spent many years in development, and during a recent interview with Bloomberg (via PC Gamer), the pair talked about how the title’s creative ambitions were derailed.
Rydby joined the acclaimed studio in 2018 just after the release of “Batman: Arkham Knight,” a time when Rocksteady was very confident as they had multiple “Batman: Arkham” hits under their belt.
He confirms the game was designed to be live service from day one, but initially parent company Warner Bros. and the developer agreed to be generous to players so they wouldn’t have to “buy a bunch of crap to enjoy the game”.
As the delays piled up, executives got very worried about making their money back and were asking questions like “How many players can we reach with the feature?” and “How can we twist this design into something that can be more replayable?”.
Timelines were also crunched, stressing out the developers even more. Rydby says:
That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore. I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in.
I think as an industry we are severely losing our way. It used to be passion projects that you loved and hoped other people loved too. When they did, it was such an amazing feeling. It became less and less of that. It became: ‘Let’s hope it sells. Let’s hope we get money from it.'”
In February, it was reported that Rocksteady was working on a new single-player “Batman” game, followed by another report a year ago that they were hiring for a new live-service game.
