Bloomberg: Behind ‘Suicide Squad,’ the Year’s Biggest Video-Game Flop

What ashame, i knew people who were working on it years ago, from what i got told, secretary of the project was the most frustrating thing, all people got told was to it was set in supermans city lmao
 
Ozriel said:
I hope people now understand that In the real world, many devs don't jump straight into making the next game right after release of a game.

Hogwarts Legacy released Q1 2023. They're currently working on their pitch for their next game that hasn't yet been greenlit, a year later.
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Who are you even talking to?
 
So sad to hear what Rocksteady has become after the Arkham series, but seems some of them funded a new studio i wish the best for them
 
They should have just made another Batman game after Arkham Knight like most probably wanted. Superman game would have been great too.
 
Draugoth said:
Everybody is chasing Game as A Service trends but fail to realize that 90% of the player base are males who like testosterone fuel and hot anime chicks

rQ69CsY.png
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Well, he is part of so we will deny most of time.
 
I'm amazed how many years, this game went through hundreds of people, thousands of meetings, and everyone thought to themselves "hell yeah we're onto something good here"?
And then they release that first gameplay trailer to an overwhelmingly negative response, and then go ahead and release this game anyway with some minor "adjustments".

I mean, I could guess it would bomb just from the first glimpse. Not sure what Rocksteady thought they were doing with this. I assume there were just too much exec interventions from WB to chase that GaaS golden cow
 
I do agree that this article omit loads of reason about why the game was dead even before release.

IDK if his anonymity source he mention is the part of the problem that don't see those kind of fights between devs and the nerd/comic fanbase about respecting the source material or if this is Jason way of bad faith doing.

There are more to discuss about this games fail and most of what make this game bad is not even mention in this huge article.
 
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VulcanRaven said:


Also spoilers about the game:
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Humans usually learn from their mistakes, but for that to happen they need to first recognize their mistakes. Unfortunately, the helicopter parenting tree continues to produce poisoned fruit and the children cannot recognize their mistakes it seems.
 
sloppyjoe_gamer said:
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The endless dickheads in the comments trying to say this is all because of DEI and Sweet baby Inc...

Yeah, that's it lads. Woke nonsense is definitely what killed this game... not the horrendously shallow, uninspired, greed fuelled, GaaS gameplay, terrible narrative driven by the need to produce future content, and the pointless, stupid pivot away from the kind of games they were known for.

Fuck about.

The woke stuff is annoying as shit. But it's not why these multi-million dollar games are failing. It's tangential.
 
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FunkMiller said:
The endless dickheads in the comments trying to say this is all because of DEI and Sweet baby Inc...

Yeah, that's it lads. Woke nonsense is definitely what killed this game... not the horrendously shallow, uninspired, greed fuelled, GaaS gameplay, terrible narrative driven by the need to produce future content, and the pointless, stupid pivot away from the kind of games they were known for.

Fuck about.

The woke stuff is annoying as shit. But it's not why these multi-million dollar games are failing. It's tangential.
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Unless I missed the GAF recaps, ya I dont think SS was crap due to woke stuff. It was just a shit game.

In the tweet though, GAAS should not be a reason. I interpreted it as GAAS and being late to the party. Tons of games are GAAS and all the most played and profitable games are GAAS. SS was just a bad game. It also didnt help it was SS characters. These are c-tier characters people dont care about the movies either.
 
FunkMiller said:
The endless dickheads in the comments trying to say this is all because of DEI and Sweet baby Inc...

Yeah, that's it lads. Woke nonsense is definitely what killed this game... not the horrendously shallow, uninspired, greed fuelled, GaaS gameplay, terrible narrative driven by the need to produce future content, and the pointless, stupid pivot away from the kind of games they were known for.

Fuck about.

The woke stuff is annoying as shit. But it's not why these multi-million dollar games are failing. It's tangential.
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While I agree with you regarding the nature of the game itself that led it to be a flop, DEI is a huge part of that rot.

DEI is not just the disgusting things that they are shoving down our throats with Sweet baby Inc., it's the hiring of unqualified staff and team members just for the sake of diversity and virtue signaling, rather than experience, merits, and qualification. It's prominent not only in the gaming industry but Hollywood and many other industries.

The woke stuff is indeed annoying, but the core DEI stuff inside companies and organizations is what leads to their downfall.
 
yazenov said:
While I agree with you regarding the nature of the game itself that led it to be a flop, DEI is a huge part of that rot.

DEI is not just the disgusting things that they are shoving down our throats with Sweet baby Inc., it's the hiring of unqualified staff and team members just for the sake of diversity and virtue signaling, rather than experience, merits, and qualification. It's prominent not only in the gaming industry but Hollywood and many other industries.

The woke stuff is indeed annoying, but the core DEI stuff inside companies and organizations is what leads to their downfall.
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Sorry, not seeing anywhere near enough evidence to support that. There are plenty of successful games around that would have the same people on their staff. You think Baldur's Gate 3 was made by a bunch of right wing bricklayers?

I have no doubt there are unqualified staff being hired for the reasons you suggest, but the sales of games do not bear out the hypothesis that only games without woke people on the staff are successful. Spider-man 2 anyone? Hell, Hogwart's Legacy was made by people who pushed for a trans character to be in it.

DEI and Sweet Baby Inc are not the reasons these games are failing, and to say that they are excuses what's really going on: rampant, endless greed from talentless fucking executives, and the devs they can push around to do what they're told. the problem here is terrible management, terrible creative decisions, and terrible games companies, bereft of ideas and ambition.

DEI is not a huge part. It's a small one. There's a lot of other shit that's killing these games and their dev's careers.
 
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SBI and "Woke" weren't the primary reasons for this game failing. It's tangential, a factor to be sure, but a much smaller one.

The game was absolutely doomed from the very start. I'll never believe anything about their delay reasoning.

To me, it was simply because everyone was outright repulsed and shocked by Rocksteady pulling out GAAS slop after Batman and didn't want anything to do with it. It was doubly so when it was GAAS with the Suicide Squad, who *no one gives a fuck about*.

If it'd been a JLA game..maybe it wouldn't have been AS bad, but still bad if it was GAAS.

I remember the reaction was *overwhelmingly* negative. Wasn't it one of the most disliked trailers of a game out there?
 
And an additional tidbit



That's it for this game. Looks like Season 2 with Mrs. Freeze is all people are gonna get, if I were to venture a guess, considering how barebones Season 1 has been.

Feel bad for Season Pass holders.
 
M1chl said:
I am surprised it didn't happened already, last good games they did was Arkham Asylum
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The Rock Shut Up GIF by WWE


Arkham City was a masterpiece and Knight was also great (and a technical tour de force to this day)

Instead of using some C-level studio to make a GAAS game, nope, let's use WB best studio known for their singleplayer games to make one. Same shit Sony tried to pull with Naughty Dog and their Factions project.

It's like using Messi as a golkeaper and wondering why their team is losing games. "Surely it's Messi's fault"

Some GAAS success stories came from small teams working on a budget. People dont know which GAAS game is going to be a success, and which will implode in 2 months.

So why the fuck would you waste such good developers on a project like this?

Fuck those executives. They've destroyed Rocksteady.
 
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yazenov said:
The woke stuff is indeed annoying, but the core DEI stuff inside companies and organizations is what leads to their downfall.
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I don't know who made the decisions. I don't know who hired the person / people that made the decisions. But what I do know is that someone decided to take on the cost of using the Harley Quinn IP in a videogame. Not in a musical drama, but in a VIDEOGAME. And then someone decided to NOT use Harley Quinn's sex appeal to sell that videogame.

But hey, if someone who worked for Kotaku says DEI had nothing to do with this train wreck, who the hell are we to doubt them?
 
NickFire said:
I don't know who made the decisions. I don't know who hired the person / people that made the decisions. But what I do know is that someone decided to take on the cost of using the Harley Quinn IP in a videogame. Not in a musical drama, but in a VIDEOGAME. And then someone decided to NOT use Harley Quinn's sex appeal to sell that videogame.

But hey, if someone who worked for Kotaku says DEI had nothing to do with this train wreck, who the hell are we to doubt them?
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Well that's just a non sequitur. It wasn't the Harley Quinn IP that was made into a videogame. It's the Suicide Squad as a whole, and the Justice League attendant with it. It's an ensemble piece, or at least that's the idea.

I know it's a useless exercise warning for the sake of nuance, but let's not become the boys who cried sweet baby. Yes, they're involved, yes they're shit. Take them out, and what so you get? Less androgynous Wonder Woman, Harley without and undercut and maybe white Deadshot? None of that would've changed the dumbass premise and the stupid design decisions, or the decision that Hill and Walker made to do Suicide Squad in the first place.
 
The games division was supposed to be a rare bright spot for Zaslav and his investors, particularly following the success of Hogwarts Legacy, an adaptation of the Harry Potter series, which was the best-selling title of 2023 and has sold more than 24 million copies. Instead, Rocksteady delivered a historic dud. For Warner Bros., it was a painful reminder that big, ambitious video games, like blockbuster-style movies, have the potential to amass both huge windfalls and gaping losses.
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right. especially when you're dealing with a franchise that's already resulted in 2 very recent box office bombs. i mean, who coulda known?...
 
ProtoByte said:
Well that's just a non sequitur. It wasn't the Harley Quinn IP that was made into a videogame. It's the Suicide Squad as a whole, and the Justice League attendant with it. It's an ensemble piece, or at least that's the idea.

I know it's a useless exercise warning for the sake of nuance, but let's not become the boys who cried sweet baby. Yes, they're involved, yes they're shit. Take them out, and what so you get? Less androgynous Wonder Woman, Harley without and undercut and maybe white Deadshot? None of that would've changed the dumbass premise and the stupid design decisions, or the decision that Hill and Walker made to do Suicide Squad in the first place.
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I'm not saying her appearance was the sole reason it flopped. My point is it takes a special kind of stupid to make that decision in my opinion. So I am hardly surprised that a whole bunch of other stupid decisions were made.
 
yazenov said:
While I agree with you regarding the nature of the game itself that led it to be a flop, DEI is a huge part of that rot.

DEI is not just the disgusting things that they are shoving down our throats with Sweet baby Inc., it's the hiring of unqualified staff and team members just for the sake of diversity and virtue signaling, rather than experience, merits, and qualification. It's prominent not only in the gaming industry but Hollywood and many other industries.

The woke stuff is indeed annoying, but the core DEI stuff inside companies and organizations is what leads to their downfall.
Click to expand...
Agreed. I don't get people trying to downplay the SBI influences of this game. Yes the game failed because it wasn't a good game, but it was also terrible at the story, writing and characters.

It's the same with Spider-Man 2. Yes the game sold well because it had great gameplay, but SBI damaged the story, writing and characters.

It's like people are trying to shield SBI either way simply because they don't work directly with the gameplay. Sure Gameplay matters most but story and characters can be almost as important.

Can we just have games with great stories, writing and characters regardless of how the gameplay turns out?
 
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Gambit2483 said:
Agreed. I don't get people trying to downplay the SBI influences of this game. Yes the game failed because it wasn't a good game, but it was also terrible at the story, writing and characters.

It's the same with Spider-Man 2. Yes the game sold well because it had great gameplay, but SBI damaged the story, writing and characters.

It's like people are trying to shield SBI either way simply because they don't work directly with the gameplay. Sure Gameplay matters most but story and characters can be almost as important.

Can we just have games with great stories, writing and characters regardless of how the gameplay turns out?
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I guess the point is that the story and characters problem of the game is almost entirely Rocksteady's fault. The story came from a shifting patchwork of Hill's half thought our ideas, and the studio was never great at writing or characters in the first place.

With Spider-Man 2, you can see a considerable degradation of character writing, tone, and subject matter. To be honest though, even though SBI's involvement has to do with that, they're more a symptom than a cause. The cause is progressive ideology in the game industry writ large, and good luck rooting that out.

That said, it has very little to do with Suicide Squad's problems.
 
If you think the game flopped because it's woke, and not because the big gameplay reveal had boomerang guy shooting purple weak spots with an AK47 for gear score +1, you're dumber than the wokies.
 
Jason is a weasel that tore Days Gone apart only because Deacon remembered him of some guy who bullied him at school and banged the girl he jerked off at.

To claim that DEI had nothing to do with this debacle is entering Earth flattener's territory. DEI determines EVERY managerial decision on the project, from hiring a bunch of psychos as consultants to the characters' hideous looks and the cringe script. Making it GaaS is also a poor decision made by poor artists, the only kind that blooms in a DEI environment. It's a rotten work culture that only produces rotten results.
 
SirKicksalot said:
If you think the game flopped because it's woke, and not because the big gameplay reveal had boomerang guy shooting purple weak spots with an AK47 for gear score +1, you're dumber than the wokies.
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Both things are directly related. It's disingenuous to pretend that woke companies hire competent workers. It's the other way around. You only have purple weak spots in games made by wokies.
 
They tried us with this game.

And any studio that thinks gamers will go for anything, and are collectively stupid, deserves abject failure.

I hope they lost so much that they never want to develop another GaaS, again.

Fools.
 
ProtoByte said:
I guess the point is that the story and characters problem of the game is almost entirely Rocksteady's fault. The story came from a shifting patchwork of Hill's half thought our ideas, and the studio was never great at writing or characters in the first place.

With.Spider-Man 2, you can see a considerable degradation of character writing, tone, and subject matter. To be honest though, even though SBI's involvement has to do with that, they're more a symptom than a cause. The cause is progressive ideology in the game industry writ large, and good luck rooting that out.

That said, it has very little to do with Suicide Squad's problems.
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truth...

for me, the first indication of insomniac's 'change in approach' was with the ratchet & clank remake in 2016. 2018's spider-man featured both miles & mary jane in prominent roles, which i'm okay with, but which still indicates the studio was shifting toward 'inclusion', & this was very much confirmed by r&c: rift apart, about as unimaginatively 'woke' a game as has ever been. & this was all without any help from sbi...

this is all on insomniac. sbi's presence is strictly ornamental...
 
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Angry_Megalodon said:
Jason is a weasel
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True.
Angry_Megalodon said:
that tore Days Gone apart only because Deacon remembered him of some guy who bullied him at school and banged the girl he jerked off at.
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Maybe. Very clearly, the games media decided that Days Gone was mediocre enough to air out their problems with a white male protag.

Angry_Megalodon said:
To claim that DEI had nothing to do with this debacle is entering Earth flattener's territory. DEI determines EVERY managerial decision on the project, from hiring a bunch of psychos as consultants to the characters' hideous looks and the cringe script. Making it GaaS is also a poor decision made by poor artists, the only kind that blooms in a DEI environment. It's a rotten work culture that only produces rotten results.
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Let's be real for a minute: Going multiplayer with a fundamentally single player studio was the choice of Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker. Going live service was their choice. Doing Suicide Squad was their choice. By this article, it was Hill's idea to do make the subject matter killing off Justice League members.

It's a studio in boogie northwest London run by two industry vets that happen to be white men who made 3 games that preceded the wokening. To even begin to insinuate that bad decisions of that nature occur exclusively in DEI offices is nuts. You're making the same mistake the other side makes when you attribute every mistake or shortcoming to the political or demographic profiles of the people who work in these offices.

You want examples where DEI is clearly the problem from the top down? Saints Row, Forspoken and a slew of others inside and out of the videogames sphere are right there to refer to. People aren't going to take the anti-progressive activist side seriously if everything from the script to the cut vehicular customisation mechanics is blamed on DEI shit.

I'm not even saying it wasn't part of the problem with this game. In fact, one of the things in the article is "toxic positivity". I would argue that safe space mentality is a big contributor to that, and that the dozens of articles Schreier himself has written chastising leaders and devs who had expectations of their teams for being "toxic" and "putting too much pressure" on devs accelerated this move towards eggshell walking workplace dynamics across the industry.

Any insinuations or connotations of discrimination on top of that? No fucking way anyone's dipping their toes in the water. This is more subtle than androgynous Wonder Woman or lesbian insinuated Harley Quinn though, so it goes over most people's heads.
 
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Publisher demands Gaas title, Developer known for single player exerpeinces. Game fails, developer gets the cuts. If you ask me, the Publisher should cut whomever enoucraged or approved this shit.
Some exec is going to get a bonus regardless of the 200m loss, once they cut the team in half or remove it all together. Share holders will rejoice at false profits and steamlining the business to navigate challenging waters.
 
Angry_Megalodon said:
I love it how the blame is put on the studio co-founders who are no longer in the company. "Blame on the dead" as we say in my country.

Embarrassing piece of "journalism" that doesn't address the purple elephant in the room.
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Did you read the entire article? One of co founders (Hill) wanted them to have vehicles.

At one point, Hill pitched an elaborate system of vehicles that would allow players to deck out cars with weapons and navigate through the game's alien-infested streets. But each of the four playable characters were already outfitted with modes of traveling, leading to more doubts among staffers. Why, they wondered, would players using Deadshot or King Shark bother with a motorcycle when they could just soar through the air? After months of experimentation and prototyping, the vehicle system was scrapped.
 
In RockSteady's defense, they were contracted to create this. I feel a lot of the game's issue is this idea of getting a GaaS game out of a narrative concept. I feel many of the comic stuff is deeply grounded in a narrative style, they gamers want a story, good guys vs bad guys etc

Taking this IP and making it a GaaS seems like a massive miss as those that like MP might want something more focused on that idea and those that like single player stuff have little reason to care about this.

So, this can't really be RockSteady's entire fault, they where hired to create this, blame the publisher for thinking this made sense over a normal single player comic game, the thing this fucking team does well.

The days of getting some team to randomly TURN into a different team is pretty much done by many big publishers. Sony hires teams that have a history of MP, ie Bungie (wild to even say out loud Sony owns Bungie lolz) or EA with DICE or something, the fact that they are no longer doing the SP stuff with Battlefield or no MP stuff with Dragon Age, its clear they see this isn't really a thing you can just get any team to do, look at how bad Anthem turned out, clearly both Sony and EA and many publishers are seeing that to do any concept well, you must properly delegate out that work the the strength of those teams.

Too bad WB didn't get the memo...
 
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