Rocksteady co-founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker have today announced that they will be leaving the studio at the end of this year to pursue a "new adventure in gaming". Best known for their work on the Batman: Arkham series, Hill served as the director of all the mainline entries while Walker was studio director the entire time.
They have held the same positions during the development of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but their departure shouldn't be seen as a reflection of its production. The official blog post on the Rocksteady website says the PS5 title is "nearly finished". It's currently slated for a 2023 release after being delayed out of this year.
In Hill and Walker's place, Nathan Burlow (director of production, founding member) takes up the role of studio director while Darius Sadeghian is the new studio product director. "Nathan and Darius are extremely talented executives and they are passionate about continuing the high-quality game development of Rocksteady for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and all future games," the article claims. Both note they wish to continue the efforts of Hill and Walker by putting out Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and retaining Rocksteady's legacy and company culture.
By pursuing "a new adventure in gaming", it certainly sounds like Hill and Walker will be looking to set up their own studio in the future, as many other creative leads have done in the past five or so years. Thankfully, it sounds like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League won't suffer as a result of their departures.
[source rocksteadyltd.com]
Comments 29
Time for Jim Riley to make some calls.
I'm so curious as to what they'll be working on. Also curious to see how Rocksteady fares with them leaving...
Maybe they'll work for Sony... That'd be good talent to acquire.
Suicide Squad does look refreshing and very much not bland like Gotham Knights. I think it will surprise a lot of people, it shouldn't because Rocksteady are top!
Looking forward to SS but I am curios to what's next for them and RockSteady.
Shame to see Hill go. Dude really knows how to make bangers. Probably will be another 5 plus years before we hear from him again with him probably setting up his own studio.
Dang, hopefully there isn't a drop in quality of Rocksteady's games because of this, sometimes when there is new leadership that happens, with any luck the people replacing them have learned enough from the co-founders to continue to make quality games.
I am looking forward to seeing what the two exiting do next.
What? No 'Rocksteady is doomed' chatter? Guess it's only 'doom and gloom' when it involves folks leaving PlayStation.
@JustPlainLoco Have you seen a Suicide Squad trailer? They were doomed as soon as the Arkham series ended
Hey guys. Welcome to the team. We expect to have Beyond Good and Evil 2 out within the next century, so anything before that is a bonus. Enjoy your time at Ubisoft 😁
@JustPlainLoco There's only six comments before yours, maybe wait till there's at least 15+ before making that declaration.
I wonder if this has anything to do with developers calling the Xbox series s out for what it is. A constraint on this generation just as are these choices to develop cross Gen on the Sony front.
It's an absolute truth that the series S, and cross Gen focus hinders the potential of this Gen thus far aside. From a very small few Examples of ps5 native games thus far.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with having to deal with WB and the threat of having your studio closed or sold off at a moments notice at all.
Always easy to assume the worst on news like this but sometimes creatives just want to work on something smaller and more agile. Wishing them luck on future endeavours
Rocksteady is doomed!
harley quinn has so many clones . i’ve never seen so many reiterations of a character in my life
also , Rocksteady is doomed
Ah dang…I don’t like that.
Good luck to them both. The Arkham games are some of my favourites in recent memory. Exceptional games.
This game does not look good in the slightest. I actually prefer gotham knights story attempt than more suicide garbage. Too bad that game is a single player game with no clear vision.
@TripleKing333 Yeah... Right now WB is an absolute dumpster fire. With everything going on I'm surprised there hasn't been any major shakeup with the game division.
Maybe they were just sick of doing superhero/villain stuff. Anyway, good luck to them!
Is this going to be a multi-player game mostly? I was hoping to be able to play it by myself because I always bring teams down with my gaming incompetence. Life of a n00b
@Toypop Don’t believe the hate on Gotham Knights. I’ve been playing since launch day and it’s quite fun. Certainly not perfect (but what game is at launch?) but nowhere near as bad as some review sites and frame rate snobs are saying. If you’re hesitant, just wait for a sale. But it’s definitely fun.
@DETfaninATL I agree with @Toypop on Gotham Knight. It will probably go down as one of my top favorite "Batman" games.
But performance is definitely pretty bad. Even on a PC equipped with a 3080ti and a i7 11700k with the game installed to a 4th gen NVME drive. The game easily drops to well under 30FPS at 1440P. It kinda sad that some of the worse performing games I've played have been batman games (Origins, Arkham Knight PC, and Gotham Knight) as I'm a diehard fan of the characters.
Rocksteady is domed.
Happy to hear that the Suicide Squad game is almost finished!
Here's hoping they can release the game around Summer 2023, that'd be a nice sweet spot.
@AverageGamer
That right there confirms the theory I had that the only reason there isn't a 60 fps mode of Gotham Knights on PS5 is because of crap optimization. It is barely more elaborate of a game than Arkham Knight was and that ran 30fps fine on PS4.
Locked at 30fps again?
@PegasusActual93 Which is unfortunate cause it not a bad looking by any means. In someplace it a straight up better looking game than Arkham Knight... It just not heavily stylized. Arkham knight's gotham and art style is like the Burton of videos games. While Gotham Knights leans more into a mixture of Nolan, Synder, and Reeves Gotham while borrowing a bit from modem day comics.
While I will say not every game needs a 60FPS performance mode. This gane needs it... I couldn't imagine fighting some of the enemies in this game with the worse latency of 30FPS.
More like leaving before the boat sinks, imo. This will likely bomb.
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