Suicide Squad the Villain Behind Warner Bros Gaming Revenue Drop

I doubt there are many that will weep for the abomination of Suicide Squad. I'm only sad for the employees at Rocksteady forced to work on this for years. Greed kills.

I was just talking about this last night. Hogwarts is a tough act to follow, for sure, but the game SS should have been is obvious. Arkham but with Squad members that have strengths and weaknesses, and maybe you need to break them out of Arkham first. That's it. It wouldn't have beaten out HL, but that thing was a beast and HP fans be cray cray.

I'm honestly more surprised they keep supporting Suicide Squad. They should really know when to pull the plug.

Its insane we went from the Arkham Trilogy to this. What a downgrade. I understand the co-founders left, but its still sad to see.

@ATaco Probably just a contractual obligation at this point.

Zaslav need to be sacked asap.
What a travesty

Live service games are a cancer.

I just played through Suicide Squad and it's not THAT bad, but it isn't good, and it especially sucks with what they did with the storyline. What a waste. It almost feels spiteful how disrespectful it was to their own legacy. It's like the dev team was their own suicide squad, killing themselves while killing their take on Batman.

Suicide Squad is an absolute drop in the ocean compared to how badly they’ve mishandled the finances with regards to their networks. Insane.

For every Fortnite and pubg there are 10 suicide squads. One day devs will realise that making live service games is a waste of time and money.

@Boxmonkey someone should tell Arrowhead.

@naruball For every Helldivers 2, there's a Concord.

Having seen gameplay vids of suicide squad and reading all the negative online comments I gave it a miss. Then I was watching my nephew playing it on his ps5 and it isn't that bad to be fair as he was having a laugh and I was having a laugh. It's not good enough for me to warrant a purchase but if a game can make somebody have a laugh and enjoy themselves it can't be that bad can it? Not a great game but another that seems to have been treated rather harshly (please note this is my personal opinion and I know there will be those that will have to tell me otherwise...so don't!)

@naruball agree. I mean how dare arrowhead fly in the face of adversatiy..truly a despicable act.

@ShonenJump121 "I understand the co-founders left"

Don't let them off the hook! yes they jumped from the Titanic as soon as they saw the iceberg but they still steered the ship most of the way through 😐

@Northern_munkey All I will say is this: even the PS1 Fantastic Four game made someone laugh.

It’s still a horrible game, nonetheless.

To be quite honest I'm still in absolute shock and baffled that we probably got the 3 greatest batman games ever developed.

Where when everyone was speculated and dreaming, everyone all said the same thing, in Rocksteady we trust whatever is next will be amazing.

Then is happened, they ditched the entire fundamentals of what rocksteady do great and made a repetitive uninteresting game with a focus on bog standard gun play and hit points.

It's that bad that both co creators left the company before the game came out that speaks volumes.
Still can't believe what I actually witnessed,

3 Epic games, Rocksteady after 3 games became the most reliable and trust worthy studio to deliver and then they make that.

You can't even write it.

It's worse than CDPR at least they only really became trusted after witcher 3 and they made a single player game which they've added to and made the game what they set out in the end.

There is no thinking a live service fortnite with a dc character skin over the top.

@Boxmonkey - true, but they all chase making the new WoW, LoL, CoD, PUBG, Fortnite, OverWatch ... because if you succeed, you just be printing money for a while. Problem is, aforementioned games are precursors in their genre and take a big slice of the pie, and it's not easy to dethrone them, or wrestle enough playerbase away from them.

Every major succes is often a game with an original idea or perfect execution, yet publishers always try to copy those instead of trying to innovate themselves

Shock horror

Hogwarts is not a tough act to follow. They had already done it and better so with the Arkham trilogy and even Origins.
This is just the typical modern day gaming fumble that didn't focus on a quality game, rather all the monetisation and politics around it.

Good riddance the once great Rocksteady.

These live service games are like playing at a high stakes table. You put down a big bet, and most likely it's gone.

I think the problem is that when all these projects were greenlit, executives didn't appreciate how hard it would be to peel people away from the live service games they were already playing and enjoying. In the interim, those games have also re-invested in themselves, broadening their appeal, and players have become invested (closets full of Fortnite skins, and whatever else they buy, etc).

That and some of the ideas we've seen for live services have been god awful. Should've done better market research.

I've platted Suicide Squad and honestly the story was decent. If they fleshed it out, had more epic boss battles, and replaced the the absolutely ridiculous live service ending (seriously, wtf? I've never seen that before in any video game, including MMOs) then it would have been an amazing story driven game. Honestly, the combat and traversal, great graphics, and story ideas were excellent but absolutely ruined by greed

@ShonenJump121 the co founders left in 2022. They were the lead developers making Suicide Squad for 5 years. They are to blame for this game and only left the studio because they realized the game they made was incredibly bad and wanted to save their reputations.

If WB execs have an ounce of intelligence they will look at recent success of Hogwarts legacy and past success in the Arkham games and see these games sell and they all lacked live service elements.

Suicide squad sold less and dropped off big time quickly so it's telling that gamers don't want big IP's turned into soulless live service grind fests.

Bet hogwarts legacy follow up is either live service or partially live service though

“I’d buy that for a dollar!!!”

@RoomWithaMoose hence why I never said that GaaS are wonderful and everyone should make one. But to generalize and say "One day devs will realise that making live service games is a waste of time and money" is simply wrong and games like Helldivers II prove so.

I ended up bending to curiousity and used a voucher to buy it. Enjoying the first hour or so but can see it getting very repetitive.

A 'free to play' style game at full price. No surprises here.

I like the excuse why it failed was because it was released too close to Hogwarts Legacy. That's like me saying no one watched the baseball game because there was a golf game that aired the day before. They are two completely different animals with different fan bases. HL is not why Suicide squad failed.

Suicide Squad would would have sold alot better as a pure sp game.

@naruball I'm not really in a position to speak for OP. But, given that they said 'for every 2 success, there's 10 failures,' I think it's fair to assume they did not mean there's definitively no reason for anyone to ever work on a GaaS. Just that the odds are not in their favor.

So you pointing out that Helldivers 2 is a success doesn't really change their point: most of the time, GaaS is a waste of time and money. Hence my comment that only reiterated that, despite Helldivers 2, GaaS still tends to be a waste of time and money.

But really, this is an argument of semantics and it can be asserted that everyone is right.

My son and I were huge fans of the old Batman games and figured bare minimum, The suicide squad game would be worth it just for the story.

IT WAS NOT!

We just beat it today and it was very anticlimactic. I can’t imagine those that paid full price for this game. We waited for a sale and it still wasn’t worth it. It’s extremely disappointing.

@nessisonett It's almost as if throwing money at everything without a plan does not solve anything.

Maybe they can buy something else and drive it into the ground and look baffled afterwards. They won't even have the finances to double down on liveservice in the end that's the funny part.

@RoomWithaMoose That game had a way smaller budget and didn't take a decade to make plus it didn't 200 million to make.

@rusty82 The thing is there is huge potential for a live service Hogwarts simulator/RPG. I honestly imagine it since I read the books as a kid how amazing it would be to have an online game where your character is a student that goes through the actual years of training with seasonal events/exams/classes and missions. Once they graduate, they could still keep going with ministry jobs. Endless gameplay, really, and could be fun and unique if done right.

But no, let's try to copy Fortnite like everyone else and pretend it will sell bazillions because Fortnite does while knowing that players won't even bother to leave their favorite game for a copy.