Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a highly anticipated game from the all-star studio behind the best Batman games ever made. But instead of setting a new bar for live-service games, Rocksteady Studio’s blockbuster ended up reportedly costing Warner Bros. $200 million in losses after its failed launch. Two of the developers on the 2024 flop are now working on a new deckbuilding RPG and recently opened up about Suicide Squad‘s production struggles.
The game’s top designer, Axel Rydby, told Bloomberg in a new interview that the longer development dragged on, the more pressure there was to make the third-person looter shooter feel replayable and find ways to extract money from players. The focus of big meetings with Warner Bros. shifted away from what would be cool to what would help monetization. “That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore,” he told Bloomberg. “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.”
The project also burned out Johnny Armstrong, who started at Rocksteady Studios in 2010 and eventually rose to associate design director on Suicide Squad. He pointed to overconfidence coming off the team’s success with the Batman: Arkham trilogy as an issue when it pivoted to live-service, a genre with lots of different requirements compared to the bespoke level and narrative design of the studio’s critically acclaimed comic-book sandboxes. The scale of Suicide Squad made it hard to test things, he said, and a reliance on repeated small delays, rather than more strategic planning, made it impossible to make the deeper improvements needed.
“We put all these hours in, but it didn’t feel like it was tangibly getting better,” Armstrong told Bloomberg. “Everyone felt like they were having to run to stand still.”
Now both are working on a new indie project called Secret of Circadia. It’s a deckbuilder that bills itself as “an open love letter to the indie gaming industry – the Slay the Spires, Balatros, Hades, Stardew Valleys, Hollow Knights and Moonlighters out there – from a pair of slightly jaded AAA developers that both grew tired of the politics and money getting in the way of the love and passion of making games.” The duo is hoping to raise just over $11,000 on Kickstarter to deliver it. They include an anti-genAI disclaimer on the page.
“I think as an industry we are severely losing our way,” Rydby told Bloomberg. “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.’”