Genre Pivot, 'Toxic Positivity' Blamed for Suicide Squad's $200 Million Flop

This being Kevin Conroy’s last role is such a shame. Interference from money men does not result in a good game ever.

“Toxic positivity” , haha i like that , im using that. but from what i read though, they’re using it wrong. people use the word toxic for everything nowadays the word is gonna eventually not hold any weight anymore . all i read from this is overconfident & delusional or arrogant , not toxic positivity . i got an entirely different meaning for that reserved for the self righteous and virtue signalers

@Rodimusprime1313 but arkham origins had good multiplayer . multiplayer and single player together needs to come back again! Assassins creed, gears of war, halo , TLOU, uncharted, GTA, Mass Effect, Tomb Raider 2013, Ratchet & Clank 3, RDR1&2, etc are a few examples but live service ruins both SP and MP. What they did with twisted metal on PS3 was criminal .

WB still hasn't learned from this. They are doubling down on live service now. Rocksteady is now a support studio. They will be gone soon. What a shame. Arkham games weren't perfect but still amazing.

@Lavishturtle they’re better than the spiderman games by far imo

And rocksteady will take the blame with layoffs smh 🤦

How do they still not understand why games like these sell so badly. So out of touch.

If there's one thing we Push Squareers are never guilty of, it's Toxic Positivity!

@nomither6 totally agree single player games with multilayer components can work. I still play LOU factions and ME3 multiplayer

So it was pretty much like 99% of everybody's work place then where the management know better and push ahead anyway and don't listen to the workers misgivings...but blame the workers when it all goes tits up. Seagull managers..swoop in,make a load of noise,sh*t all over everything and then f**k off..

I'm not letting Rocksteady off that easy. I've read plenty of other articles that point out that this was essentially a whole new creative team compared to the Arkham games who were fully behind most of the more controversial changes.

This is all just passing the buck onto that enemy that we all like to unconditionally hate: the evil corporate executive.

@NEStalgia
Yeah because I'm toxically negative.

"Are you surprised to learn things were quite chaotic during the development of Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League?"

Absolutely not, it's painfully obvious to everyone except those in charge what was going on. It seems they are the only people in the world that can't see how the vast majority of these projects end up, despite the many examples right in front of their faces. All in the pursuit of the mythical live service gravy train which is blind luck as to if your game manages to hop aboard

Im confused.

The last article/other parts of the report said rocksteady were working on a live service multiplayer puzzler game. So they were already moving away from single player when WB got them to change to SS.

Sounds like they were on a suicide mission from the start 🙈

rocksteady shuttered in 3...2...1...

@nomither6 "people use the word woke for everything nowadays the word is gonna eventually not hold any weight anymore" fix it 😉

As for Suicide Squad the game itself is rock solid. Of course by that I mean the graphics, performance and gameplay. Is everything else that's *****, it has some of the worst writing I've ever seen and the live service loop makes it boring.

The co-founders may have jumped from the Titanic as soon as they saw the iceberg but they were stearing the ship most of the way through so they need some backlash too!

"Our game is so perfectly good that it failed"
I believe that is the denial phase in the 5-steps of grief program.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner That’s what’s in the report, yes. Strangely it’s been left out of this second PS article as well.

Mad Max, Arkham Knight, this, MK 1.

Why WB Games always messed up their devs just like their movie studios?

Four letters destroyed this game, no matter how much drivel they spew.

GAAS

@nomither6 first time I'm hearing that as well. Nowadays many try to infuse "therapy speak" into everything, leading to wildly mixed results 😂

Even if the game sucked, they're sitting on 7 years of assets they could repurpose to create the original vision.
History can repeat itself like with David Ayer's Suicide squad Vs James Gunn 's The suicide squad.

There is context missing here. The Bloomberg report clearly States that Rocksteady, On THEIR Own, were already focused on a live service scheme(codenamed "stones"), prior to being pressured into changing the project to be derived from the Arkham verse.

Don't get it too twisted here, the leadership at Rocksteady had already made the Independant decision to chase this played out predatory model. They arrived to the party too late, mimicked mediocrity, and essentially 'F'ed around and found out. Just as Sony will experience with Concord.

If you are going to try and create one of these schemes you have to produce a fun game first. Even then the tolerance/public perception for new iterations of such predation is waning at an increasing rate.

Warner bros own fault for getting greedy

@HMazzy111 I would imagine that a debate with WB would go like this:
Us: Stop investing in live-service games !
WB: But Fortnite was a success
Us: You cannot re-create lightning in a bottle.
WB: But Fornite though
Us: Gamers only have a finite amount of time for live-services
WB: Yeah but Fornite though
Us: Your Hogwarts Legacy was single-player, and the best selling of 2023!
WB: But Fortnite though

Yeah blame the gamers. That will help the studio moving forward. Much better to blame us than to look at themselves.

@nessisonett Good news! It's not Kevin Conroy's last role. He'd actually recorded his part in two other projects before his death. He's going to be in "Batman: Caped Crusader" (a series which starts in August, although it's unclear if he's playing Batman in this series). He's also playing Batman in Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part 3 (an animated film that comes out in July)

"Subsequently, this caused many staff to depart over Suicide Squad's seven-year-long development after realising they would not be working on the type of game the developer was known for, such as the Batman Arkham series."

That sounds so much like what happened with folk at Arcane Austin who wanted to work on immersive sims and found themselves making Redfall instead.

@Wiceheid Honestly wasn’t sure if Caped Crusader was still going ahead, got into a bit of bother finding a home.

Sounds a lot like the "Bioware magic" which was supposed to kick in and make Anthem good.
Another sad lesson in how chasing the live service golden egg when you have a team that doesn't know what it's doing in that genre is a fool's errand.

Toxic positivity is leading the USA straight to hell, but that's another topic entirely...

What a disaster of a project. I'm just imagining some employee at Rocksteady being like "Sir, I don't think people are going to like this idea...like...at all."

Then the higher-up just says "Nah it'll be fine! Everyone loved that there Avengers game right!?"

@nomither6 Toxic Positivity is definitely a real term and i believe they used it right in terms of the higher ups refusing to address any issues. But honestly, Toxic Positivity also existed in a ton of people trying to shame people who criticized this game.

The crowd who says, "You should just be happy about what you get!" and deems any form of criticism as toxic is a crowd that engages in Toxic Positivity. Criticism's needed and the nuke that was the Suicide Squad is evidence of it.

@TrickyDicky99 I like the term but I don't think they are using it correctly though like @nomither6 mentioned.

To me toxic positivity is when someone thinks they are doing fine but in fact is doing poorly but no one tells them the truth because they're worried about hurting their feelings.

In WB' case the developers knew it was going to be a ***** show from what WB was doing. I think calling WB dismissive of the developers' concerns would be a better way to put it.

@TrickyDicky99 I LOLed. I cried. Jim lied.

@GreatAuk I think "Toxic Positivity" defines most of gaming at this point. The whole industry is in collapse, and to fix it scrambles towards deception, manipulation, and coercion, and in every corner each has it's own group of proud defenders that would sooner take an arrow to the knee than admit their chosen series/publisher/studio/platform could ever make choice that wasn't perfect. Actually all of tech seems to be like that (looking at Apple.)

Yea, "Toxic Positivity" might be the problem. Or, a better explanation, your game just sucks.

Im confused, didn't WB say that Rocksteady were the ones that wanted to shift to a Live service game, and now they are saying WB wanted it?

@Korgon Not that I'm defending any decisions in regards to this game, but when this game entered production, The Avengers was not only not a flop, but hadn't even been announced at that point. Everyone was trying to chase that Destiny money and almost every single title failed. What's a bigger failure is that post-Avengers in 2020, Suicide Squad stayed in development for 4 more years and nothing changed. It's almost like WB and Rocksteady knew the game was terrible, but had spent so much money on it by that point (it was in development for 8 years by the time it released) that the game had to be finished. It's yet another reason why I'm glad Naughty Dog cancelled The Last of Us Online. We don't need another SP studio failing because of a live service game (I just wish Naughty Dog made that decision in 2020 and not 2023).

@theSpectre
Fair points. I do agree that I just can't believe they saw what eventually happened with Avengers and instead of pivoting at least somewhat then, instead they just decided to keep going down that same track. That was what I was referring to more than anything. This game clearly went through a lot of troubled development due just bad management and its just a sad thing to look back on. I hope Rocksteady can bounce back somehow with their next game (assuming they get the chance to develop another game anyway) but it's going to be a tough sell to say the least.

@Korgon I'm not so sure they are going to get the chance. I have a feeling that WB might shut them down as they are seemingly pivoting to Hogwarts Legacy as their flagship. I really wish we had just gotten Arkham 4. At least we have Spider-Man now.

This game never made sense. They should've scrapped it last year after the abismal gameplay reveal.

What did they expect after making Harley uglier and less appealing than the original games.

That’s a funny excuse. Theres definitely more of it kicking about but word on the street is this game was just bad

Toxic positivity? How about the fact it was just a rubbish game with lots of wholly unnecessary agenda tripe ?