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Report: Suicide Squad development impacted by unclear vision and perfectionism

Report: Suicide Squad development impacted by unclear vision and perfectionism

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. 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.