Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League generally isn't remembered as a successful game, critically or commercially, but apparently the trauma of making it was enough to make two of its lead developers nearly quit the games industry.
Of course, I was being exceedingly generous describing Rocksteady's live-service Suicide Squad game as simply unsuccessful. In reality, it was a catastrophic failure that cost publisher Warner Bros. Games a reported $200 million in write-offs and led to multiple rounds of layoffs at Rocksteady, not to mention the reported cancelation of Monolith's Wonder Woman game. Even so, apparently things were even worse behind the scenes during Suicide Squad's seven-year development cycle.
Associate design lead Johnny Armstrong and game director Axel Rydby tell Bloomberg development priorities shifted from the project's early days as repeated delays caused production costs to swell and Warner Bros. executives to gradually push for features that would help them recoup their investment. Questions like, "How many players can we reach with this feature?" and "how can we twist this design into something that can be more replayable?" were allegedly frequently asked in meetings.
"That's when I started feeling like I wasn't making games anymore," Rydby says. "I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn't the gaming industry I wanted to work in."
Armstrong felt a similar feeling of disillusionment following the game's disappointing launch, telling Bloomberg the experience developing the game and the subsequent blowback was bad enough that his joy of making games was temporarily diminished.
"I felt everything drained from me," Armstrong says. "I said, 'I can't do this again. I don't know if I'm done with the industry, but I'm done.' I could feel myself coming apart at the seams."
Of course, Armstrong and Rydby aren't done making games, but they did both leave Rocksteady after Suicide Squad and in fact are joining forces on the indie retro deckbuilder RPG Secret of Circadia, which has racked up $1500 in funding from its Kickstarter. That's obviously peanuts compared to any AAA budget, but if they manage to secure their goal of $11,382, we'll get to see if they're able to put their money to better use than when they were under Warner Bros' umbrella.
Going independent is helping Rydby rediscover his love for game development, but he has a warning for publishers prioritizing sales potential over the passion of developers: "I think as an industry we are severely losing our way," he says. "It used to be passion projects that you loved and hoped other people loved too. When they did, it was such an amazing feeling. It became less and less of that. It became: 'Let's hope it sells. Let's hope we get money from it.'"
Guess which Rocksteady games made our list of the best Batman games ever made.
