With losses of over $200 million, this may be one of the costliest failures in video game history. Although We liked it a lot and gave it a very positive review.There is no doubt that he made several mistakes that alienated the players. What really happened behind the scenes? There is a lot of gossip about it, some are quite accurate and others seem like conspiracy theories. Let’s really look at why the game failed Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
Through a report published in Bloomberg on the morning of June 6, 2024journalist Jason Schreier reveals that he spoke with almost two dozen people involved in the development of the game to discover a poorly managed, perfectionist and inadequate production for the studio to which it was commissioned.
Surprise! It was the idea of the directors of Warner Bros.
When British studio Rocksteady finally released Batman: Arkham Knight In 2015, he began working on a puzzle game codenamed Stones. This was canceled in late 2016 when management announced that they would instead work on the game. Suicide Squad. Warner Bros. executives traveled to the studio to present the ‘games as a service’ model as the future of the industry. At that time, titles like Destiny y Overwatch They were a massive hit that every studio wanted to copy.
The managers insisted on this even though Rocksteady had no experience in those kinds of games. During those days they hired almost a hundred more people to work on the new title, reaching 250 employees. Many left the studio when they realized that they were going to work on a game as a service with multiplayer and not on single-player adventures like the Batman games that popularized this team.
Changes and more changes
If the game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Had it come out on the originally planned date – 2019, when the public had not yet had enough of this type of game – it might have avoided failure. But the perfectionism of the director of the Sefton Hill studio (who could take months to approve the work of his employees) and changes to the project caused long postponements.
The first of them was abandon hand-to-hand combat for one focused on firearms. This confused the developers who didn’t understand why they had to give a shotgun to a character literally called Captain Boomerang. Then it came an elaborate vehicle system that they spent months on before scrapping it.
Rejection from fans
The first signs of the possible failure of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice league They arrived when a gameplay video was presented in 2020. As we already know, no one liked that these characters got rid of their iconic weapons in favor of firearms, much less items as a service.
Warner Bros. and Rocksteady further postponed the game, but it was too late to correct course. The developers knew that what they were doing was not going to be liked, but the managers insisted on moving forward.
Schreier’s Bloomberg report goes much deeper into the goals of Warner Bros. and the disconnect that exists between executives who continue to chase trends with the reality of the video game industry.
This is a sad story. We Believe that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a good game. Has great characters and a great story, but the game-as-a-service elements it has greatly harm it and perhaps make it deserve its failure.