By: Nick Gambino
When Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was released back in February nobody could have predicted it would fail so spectacularly. The game was built on a pretty popular DC property and by the same game studio (Rocksteady) behind the wildly popular Batman: Arkham series of games. The formula is there for success. So honestly, how could it go wrong?
Well apparently it could go very very wrong. It’s now been reported that Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is taking a whopping $200 million loss on the game. Oof.
The news comes from an earnings call in which WBD’s CEO, David Zaslav, called its performance “disappointing.” Bloomberg then did a dive into what happened behind the scenes that led to the failure of the seemingly slam-dunk game.
The live-service shooter and looter was in development for years. We’re talking a good eight years. And in that time, the runway was filled with potholes, sharp turns and brick walls. A lot of it seems to come from sloppy management which resulted in a fractured team that couldn’t get on the same page. Many workers even left after spinning their wheels trying to figure out what they were supposed to be making.
The choice to make it a live-service game certainly didn’t help. And even this apparently kept changing. The live-service game can be a bit controversial in concept alone. The very nature of it is designed to be a manipulative time suck. Sure, there are regular updates to a live-service game, but it also keeps tractor beaming the player back in every day and encourages them to fork over real money to get those little dopamine hits.
This is all just so different from the way Rocksteady has operated in the past with games like Batman: Arkham. It was a swing and a miss and WBD is holding a light money bag $200 million short.
Next up, Rocksteady is looking to right the ship with a director’s cut of Hogwarts Legacy. And then maybe a non-live-service game, perhaps a new installment of Batman: Arkham.
