Suicide Squad Dev Rocksteady Suffers More Layoffs as PS5 Game Hits PS Plus

Warner Bros. Discovery: The Corporate Suicide Squad

A single player Suicide Squad game from them could have been good.

I tried suicide squad for the first time last night and god the tutorial section does not entice you to keep playing it's so bland.

When will companies learn it'd save them a hell of a lot more money in the long term if they fire the decision makers who force this stuff on broader development teams than if they fire the actual, boots in the ground talent that can help them recoup the losses by working on other, future projects?

There's no way in hell the salaries of such staffers comes close to the cost of continuing to employ people who make the bad decisions when the value added by their future potential is taken into account. No suit is going to make you a hit. But they sure as hell will help deliver you utter bombs.

I've never disagreed with a review more than PushSquare's 7/10 for Suicide Squad except for perhaps it's Concord review.

Repetitive gameplay, horrible dialogue, characters constantly holding the idiot ball, bugs galore and what is quite simply nothing less than spiteful treatment of several beloved characters.

I hold no ill-will towards those who were just doing their jobs. But I have no sympathy whatsoever for the people who were actually pulling the strings.

2025 begins the same way 2024 ended.

Asian developers are rising up while the West is literally burning.

Oh no…..anyway when’s the wonder women gaming coming.

They're so cooked. Such a shame.

Maybe they should try to make a good game. It seems that idea never occured to them. There was nothing good about that game. The gameplay was terrible. Nobody cares about Suicide Squad and the characters are awful. Then add some live service in to make sure it failed.

For the employees who were just following designs given to them by higher ups, I feel sorry for them and hope they end up in better places.

For Rocksteady itself? I’m good with them just going away at this point, especially since they just can’t be bothered to pump out a 60fps patch for Arkham Knight on any console, but COULD pump out a game that no one asked for and (judging from the sales and Steam player counts) barely anyone wanted.

It's a shame that the people who create absolute art, are the victims of CEO's and other's who are 'in charge' dumb decisions.

I wish NRS, Monolith, and Rocksteady could up and leave. WB is definitely going to kill each of them anyway.

It’s a shame as there’s talent there but when GaaS is pushed it’s often a poor result.

Maybe if they try TWO live service games no one outside of management asked for, they’ll make a comeback.

But of course, nature is healing I guess, japanese/korea/chinese game developers that make good games are getting raise/ps5 pro/money, while western devs that make bad games are getting layoffs instead.

Not surprising and expected, others will soon follow.

I put a little time into Suicide Squad today once it was up on PS Plus. I'm to the point where I'm supposed to go kill Green Lantern and I just can't care. It's so bland and repetitive, and there is zero joy in leveling or finding gear. Time to delete and give The Stanley Parable a go.

Losses are just as instructive as profits so a good lesson for the industry as whole and hopefully a better future with games we want to play.

@Deadhunter A very good choice!

Gaas meshed into a single player, horrific writing, boring and reptitive gameplay and art style not great. Harley was such a downgrade from the Arkham games in the design. I assumed the studio stays open solely for the name Rocksteady and seeing potential if they can rebound

@ECharles yeah cause WB will totally take the right message from all of this. What an obscene thing to say. Especially in an industry where you can release something that is a critical and commercial success, and still lose your job.

@PorkChopExpress They will probably get a extra bonus after hitting their target when they fired some people.

What sucks is the people responsible for this are never the ones to pay any price. Instead the workforce who did their jobs are the ones to lose them, not the executives who made the awful decisions that were responsible for such a horrible game.

How about companies stop making gaas games I don't wish anyone lose there jobs but if it's the only way stop theses crappy gaas games then it's the only way

@revansgc well said. Sad but true

I just want to know what the hell Rocksteady and WB did with the almost year-long delay they did after the initial reveal was roundly panned on social media. I haven't played the game but I can't see any differences between the gameplay reveal and the streams/reviews/commentary I've seen since release.
I suspect that the time was mainly used to try and 'reset' the marketing cycle by WB, rather than try to take into account any of the feedback that had come from players. (I appreciate it would have been a momentous ask in many respects, but it's not like WB/Rocksteady weren't warned that the game had the appeal of a bucket of tepid sick to the market broadly.)

Could sold millions of copies by making another Batman game. Drop the Arkhamverse, start afresh. Do Batman Beyond. Do something based on The Batman. I dunno. It's frickin' Batman. The guy is evergreen, the Arkham games still sell pretty well even today on digital storefronts.

But no. Sacrifice your cashcow studio, supposedly one of the best of the PS3 and PS4 generations, on the altar of life service titles. Using a lifeless IP (Suddy Squad will NEVER be a big mainstream thing, guys, it shouldn't have taken you two movies and a game to figure that out) and tired looter shooter mechanics.

WB and Rocksteady would've won the Dunces-of-the-Year award were it not for the valiant efforts of Sony and Firewalk. Although now you can argue that Suddy Squad failed even at failing, getting one-upped like that.

Would these lay offs have been prevented if suicide squad was a monster hit? Not convinced that's the case.

the game was in development for a decade, the game finally comes out, regardless of its reception and sales, a lot of those people suddenly had little to nothing to do and no company wants to pay people they don't currently need. it could be years before they need somebody with their skillset again with how long games now take to make so it just makes sense to lay them off. It's not nice but people need to get used to it, people working in games can expect to have a job until the game they're working on is complete, afterwards, if you're not going to be needed on another project instantly, expect to be looking for another company that does. It's not an unheard of practice it's just new-ish to games as they adapt to much bigger projects and bigger budgets.

@LikelySatan WB gets the message and competitors do as well. Job loss/churn is critical and important in flourishing markets.

Trim the fat get rid of the nonessential's

They're doing everything they can to try to sell the game at this point , it was recently on sale for peanuts i bet they begged sony to put it on ps plus.

@StrickenBiged the people running the show at these companies, directing the games, their egos are massive and they won't ever listen to feedback from gamers instead they'll post about "haters" on social media, their game will flop and instead of accountability they'll blame the gamers who they didn't listen to and actively dislike.

It's the equivalent of me running a food stand serving you burgers full of grease and gristle at a premium with a look of disdain on my face then wondering why nobody shows up to buy my product and instead of reflecting on how i could improve, I'd just blame the customers.

Reading the comments and just sitting back and reviewing Rocksteadys downfall

And this awful attempt at a game. This game was worse than concord. Yes no one cared for concord but the actual game play was solid.

Everything about Suicide Squad screams cash grab live service with a dc comic skin over the top.

But truly this is probably the greatest and saddest game dev story I've ever witnessed.

Just think RockSteady were the legends the one studio who could do no wrong.

We got 3 amazing single batman games. Which seemed like they was made with love and complex detail to the lore.

We even got a spin off top rated vr experience from them which I enjoyed.

We also was given a side developer making spin off batman game, which maybe was rough around the sledges but the game and story was really good.

It was to the point that even with RockSteady being super quiet everyone and anyone would of said in RockSteady we trust.

We even talked about rumours and what we would love to see from them. Maybe moving on from batman. Teenage mutant ninja turtles was even rumoured.

Like we didn't care, whatever they was going to make we didn't even question it.

Ans then the reveals.

Both studios, both games, both live service.

Like both games were god awful.

I would just love to see what actually happened and insight on how a true legend of the comic book triple A gaming market powerhouse RockSteady ended up making a pretty bland third person shooter within a live service environment.

It just doesn't make sense.

Hopefully one day someone will talk and we will know what really happened.

I've been playing through the Arkham games for the first time on my PC. I've loved all of them and I'm halfway through Arkham Knight. I'm in awe of the developer, so hugely disappointed with how Suicide Squad ended out being. I wonder what happened to Rock Steady? I hope they can survive this and perhpas make another Batman game. There is room for the games to grow even further.

@Bluemoon2008 the game was in development for a decade, the game finally comes out, regardless of its reception and sales, a lot of those people suddenly had little to nothing to do and no company wants to pay people they don't currently need.

Might have a point. If you're building a AAA game these days, that's a minimum 3 year cycle, easily more (this one was a decade, some people said, right?). Do you need the same type of employees at the beginning of those 3+ years that you need near the end? How many of these studios are hiring people for 1-2 years, letting them go as they don't need THAT skill as much now as they once did, and hiring different people for what they DO need? You don't need a ton of QA employees at the very beginning, but you sure need them nearing the end of development, right?

I'm not saying Rocksteady is doing a good job here - just that I wonder how much of this is cyclical rather than incompetent.

@RobN Exactly. Nobody needs QA testers when theres nothing to test in the games infancy, that's just one of the easy to comprehend examples of which they'll be many. The industry has to accept and adapt to the evolution of how a game's made and what that means for jobs.

Contract work is the natural progression for this industry. Think of a building site, thats the most accurate analogy i can come up with for comparison. you're not bringing in an electrician day 1 to wire a building when the foundations havent even been laid yet. Likewise, once the shell of a building is up, you dont need a bricklayer hanging around being paid to watch electricians install plug sockets. Most people involved will come in as required, do their role and move onto the next thing as soon as their part is done. And once the building is complete, its common most people involved move on to other projects and only a core, small number of staff remain to seek and start the next project. Nobody has a problem with this, it makes perfect sense, and it now makes perfect sense for the games industry too, which is why I do not understand the constant highlighting of job losses.

Rocksteady aren't really the right sample case to make this point though given they have had an abnormally large budget and time frame to make suicide squad and have the Arkham success behind them and have the financial power of WB games backing them meaning they can easily afford to keep all staff on if they so choose, but for many other game companies now, they quite literally live or die by their last release and so cost cutting will be essential for survival.