Suicide Squad flop cost Warner Bros. $200 million but Rocksteady is safe claims report

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League key art — Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League – one of the biggest flops ever in gaming (Warner Bros. Games)

Developer Rocksteady is supposedly not in danger of being shut down and is currently working on a ‘director’s cut’ of Hogwarts Legacy.

It seemed obvious to most gamers that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League would be a flop the moment that gameplay footage was shown, but the full extent of its failure has been exposed by a new report that has spoken to over a dozen developers involved with the game’s creation.

Although Warner Bros. has made no official comment, it’s reported that they will be taking a $200 million (£157 million) loss on the game, implying its budget was considerably more than that.

The reasons for the game’s failure may seem obvious to gamers but the Bloomberg report claims that a ‘constantly shifting vision’, a culture of ‘perfectionism’, and developer Rocksteady Studios having no experience with live service games were all part of the problem.

Interestingly, the report reveals that Rocksteady’s original plan, after releasing Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015, was to make a ‘multiplayer puzzle-solving game’ codenamed Stones. A year later that was abandoned and the Suicide Squad concept was first suggested, with a release date goal of 2019 or 2020.

The concept original conceived by Rocksteady was not a live service game though and instead it’s claimed that Warner Bros. executives, influenced by the success of Destiny and League Of Legends, convinced Rocksteady’s bosses that the Suicide Squad game should be a live service title.

Many gamers were confused as to why characters with names like Captain Boomerang primarily only used guns in the game, and supposedly the design was originally based around melee combat.

Apparently, Rocksteady co-founder Sefton Hill was a perfectionist, who took months to review other people’s work, but ‘struggled to convey his evolving ideas’ and admitted he hadn’t played much of Destiny and other similar games.

Can The Joker save the Suicide Squad? (Picture: Rocksteady) — Adding The Joker isn’t going to help anything (Warner Bros. Games)

This and other problems were seemingly not helped by Warner Bros. executives, who claimed to love everything they were shown of the game and told Rocksteady that they expected it to become a ‘billion-dollar franchise.’

Both Rocksteady co-founders left the studio in 2022 to form a new studio (which has reportedly signed a publishing deal with Microsoft) but the only good news to come from the report is that apparently Rocksteady is not in danger of being shut down, as many fans have feared.

Supposedly, Warner Bros. considers its game division to be understaffed, although it would hardly be unusual in the games industry for execs to say one thing and do another.

The report suggests that Rocksteady is currently working on a ‘director’s cut’ of single-player hit Hogwarts Legacy, as the studio heads pitch a new single-player concept of their own. That may suggest that Warner Bros. has realised the folly of trying to get Rocksteady to make live service games and is instead happy to let them return to what they do best.

This puts Warner Bros. in a similar situation to Sony, in that both publishers have publicly stated that they want to focus on live service games and yet, as Helldivers 2’s popularity falters, neither has had a long-term success with them.

$200 million is a shocking amount of money to lose on making a video game and apart from the danger its failure implies for Rocksteady and other Warner studios, it’s suggested that its high-profile failure could scare away outside investment from the games industry in general.

A lack of external investment is one of the, many, reasons for the recent spate of layoffs in the industry, that has so far affected over 10,000 people. As such, failures like Suicide Squad make it more difficult for everyone, as companies try to convince outsiders that video games are a stable industry to be involved in.