Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Suffered From A Lack Of Experience With Multiplayer Games And A “Constantly Changing Vision”

You’ll all likely remember that about a month ago when Warner Bros. held their financial call, CEO David Zaslav blamed the poor performance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for a $200M loss in profits.

In theory, the shooter probably should have done better. It’s based on a popular IP and Rocksteady was doing the development, but it was also plagued with issues. We’ve had some idea what these issues were, but today a report from Bloomberg (picked up by The Verge) offered insight into what all went wrong.

A simple summary of the issues comes down to two things: a lack of experience in developing multiplayer games and constant shifting in development plans. Remember, Rocksteady is known for its work on single-player offerings – which the company has historically done well. Multiplayer, live-service games are a different beast. According to the report, new Rocksteady employees didn’t even know they were making a multiplayer game and as a result, left the company.

The lack of knowledgeable manpower combined with the fact that the studio leads kept shifting focus, eventually moving from melee to heavy gun combat combined to result in a development process where the team struggled to develop… well… all the things that are important to a video game, like battles and bosses in ways that kept them from being too repetitive.

It only got worse from there as the company’s co-founder left Rocksteady in 2022. The end result was a delayed game that contributed to a pretty sizable profit loss for Warner Bros.