A new report has detailed some of the issues that developers faced in making Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
According to Bloomberg, the project was plagued with problems, such as a shifting change in what the game was intended to be, as well as perfectionism from management. Though Rocksteady was the studio that eventually shipped the game, it was not Warner Bros' first choice; the company's Montreal studio was actually working on a Suicide Squad title, but this version of the project was axed and the Batman Arkham maker was brought in. Rocksteady, at the time, was working a cancelled multiplayer puzzle game codenamed Stones.
Sources have told Bloomberg that Warner insisted that the Suicide Squad project was alive-service game, causing the studio to have to swell in size from around 160 staff to 250, something that resulted in the firm having issues managing its growing workforce, while also being smaller than studios working on comparable games, such as Bungie and Destiny.
Live-service was also a very different to the kinds of games that Rocksteady normally made. The studio struggled to implement the grinding and repetitive nature of such projects in an interesting way.
Staff also said that Rocksteady management was a bottleneck on development. In particular, co-founder and game director Sefton Hill reportedly scrapped script work and had a hard time communicating his vision for the project.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched in early 2024 but fell short of Warner Bros' expectations.