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Bloomberg: Behind ‘Suicide Squad,’ the Year’s Biggest Video-Game Flop

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
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David Haddad, the head of video games for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., visited the London offices of subsidiary Rocksteady Studios in mid-February for an all-hands meeting. While previous gatherings with the executive had been peppered with tactful euphemisms, this time Haddad was blunt, according to two people briefed on his remarks. Weeks after its release, the studio’s latest game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was tanking.

Haddad shared few details on the exact scope of the Suicide Squad misfire, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. But it didn’t take long for them to find out the extent of the damage.

On May 9, during an earnings call, Warner Bros. revealed that it was taking a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad — making it one of the gaming world’s worst blunders.
Behind the scenes, according to interviews with nearly two dozen people who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press, the development of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a tumultuous affair, plagued by countless delays. The game failed for a number of reasons, said the people, including a constantly shifting vision, a culture of rigid perfectionism and a genre pivot that was ill-suited for the studio. A spokesperson for Warner Bros. Games declined to comment.

The costly miss could extend beyond Warner Bros. and “further deter investment in gaming by traditional media firms when they should be expanding,” said Joost van Dreunen, who teaches the video-game business at New York University.

The high-profile failure came at a particularly bad time for Warner Bros. Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav. The parent company of CNN, HBO, TNT and other cable networks was already grappling with challenges on multiple fronts, from plunging TV ad sales and struggling movie theaters to escalating sports rights fees and growing threats from AI. Over the past two years, the company’s share price had plummeted from $26 in April 2022 to a little over $8 the day of the call.
The games division was supposed to be a rare bright spot for Zaslav and his investors, particularly following the success of Hogwarts Legacy, an adaptation of the Harry Potter series, which was the best-selling title of 2023 and has sold more than 24 million copies. Instead, Rocksteady delivered a historic dud. For Warner Bros., it was a painful reminder that big, ambitious video games, like blockbuster-style movies, have the potential to amass both huge windfalls and gaping losses. On the call, Zaslav described it as a “disappointing release” that “overshadowed” the rest of the quarter.

For years, Warner Bros. has been struggling to transform its DC Comics assets into a wellspring of recurring hits, much as the Walt Disney Co. has done with Marvel Comics. In August 2016, Warner Bros. released Suicide Squad, a gory sci-fi action movie based on the comic book series, which originated in 1959. The film, starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie, featured a platoon of villains strong-armed by the US government into a dangerous mission to save the world. It went on to generate ticket sales of $750 million on a budget of $175 million, a major boon for the studio.

Afterward, the company hustled to build on the momentum. At its gaming studio in Montreal, Warner Bros. already had a Suicide Squad video game that was struggling to gel. With the stakes heightened, Haddad pulled the plug and turned, instead, to the most prestigious of the company’s dozen video-game studios.
Founded in London in 2004, Rocksteady had grown into an industry darling thanks to Batman: Arkham, a series of games that was revered by critics and sold millions of copies. Following Rocksteady’s third and final installment, which came out in 2015, the studio’s co-founders Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill, eager to do something different, started working on a prototype of an original multiplayer puzzle-solving game, codenamed Stones.

Around the end of 2016, Walker and Hill told their staff there’d been a change of plans. Stones was out. Suicide Squad was in. According to people who attended the meetings, Hill explained that he saw it as a better opportunity than making something new from scratch and that the company hoped to release the game in 2019 or 2020. (Walker and Hill declined requests to be interviewed for this story.)

At the time, the broader industry was growing increasingly fixated on “games as a service” — such as Destiny and League of Legends — which generate sales long after their initial release, continuously reengaging players with endless updates and raking in fresh profits year after year. Armed with a battery of presentations, Warner Bros. executives traveled to London and made the case that the growing category was the industry’s future.
It was a field in which Rocksteady had no prior experience. The Batman: Arkham games were all single-player. Even so, Rocksteady executives soon decided that, in keeping with their parent company’s newfound enthusiasm, Suicide Squad would become an online multiplayer game with live-service content.

As it set out to master a new set of skills, Rocksteady expanded. Over the next seven years, it would swell from roughly 160 to more than 250 people — a size that grew unwieldy for managers yet still remained far smaller than the enormous teams behind similar games, such as Destiny.

During the early days, the studio kept its work on Suicide Squad a secret, even from potential hires. Several people who came on board during this era said they were surprised when they first arrived at the offices to learn that they would be working on a multiplayer game, not at all what Rocksteady was known for. Many would depart as a result.
Over time, the leaders’ vision kept morphing, most notably switching from an emphasis on melee combat to heavily focusing on guns. The change left some staff members wondering why protagonists such as Captain Boomerang, known for fighting with his namesake weapon, would suddenly pivot to gunplay.

In August 2020, after three years and multiple delays, Rocksteady finally revealed its plans, telling fans Suicide Squad would be released in 2022. But additional frustrations kept piling up. The project’s massive world and four playable heroes were a significant increase in complexity from the Arkham games. Engineers, under the impression they were rushing toward an immutable deadline, prioritized short-term fixes that later proved to be hindrances as the release date kept getting pushed back.

Staff members sometimes waited weeks or months for Hill, the studio’s perfectionist co-founder and director of the game, to review their work, said the people familiar, creating a bottleneck that further slowed development. He scrapped big chunks of the script and struggled to convey his evolving ideas, they said, confessing that he hadn’t spent much time with competing games such as Destiny. The constant delays hurt morale and led staff to fret that they were discarding too much and failing to make real progress.
At one point, Hill pitched an elaborate system of vehicles that would allow players to deck out cars with weapons and navigate through the game’s alien-infested streets. But each of the four playable characters were already outfitted with modes of traveling, leading to more doubts among staffers. Why, they wondered, would players using Deadshot or King Shark bother with a motorcycle when they could just soar through the air? After months of experimentation and prototyping, the vehicle system was scrapped.

One of the biggest issues, said people familiar, was that the battles, levels and bosses in a live-service game needed to be designed so players could tackle them over and over again, while Rocksteady was accustomed to telling stories that were only experienced once. Hampered by bloated code, the team struggled to find ways to make these activities feel less tedious and repetitive.

Multiple people who worked on the project say their growing concerns were often met with promises from management that Suicide Squad would eventually coalesce at the last minute, just as the Arkham games had. Several employees adopted the term “toxic positivity” to describe the culture of the company, which discouraged criticism. Leadership didn’t seem worried, they say, even as other traditionally single-player game studios that chased the live-service trend were delivering abysmal results with games such as Anthem (which earned a lowly score of 59 out of 100 on Metacritic), Marvel’s Avengers (67 out of 100) and Redfall (56 out of 100).
Despite the internal concerns among frontline workers, executives from Warner Bros. kept reviewing demonstrations of the game and sending laudatory feedback, praising the graphics and saying they expected Suicide Squad to become a billion-dollar franchise.

Whatever the outcome, the studio’s co-founders wouldn’t be there to see it through. In the fall of 2022, Warner Bros. announced that Hill and Walker were leaving Rocksteady to work on “a new adventure” and that a pair of longtime employees, Nathan Burlow and Darius Sadeghian, were being promoted in their wake. The change in leadership shocked the Rocksteady staff, and Hill and Walker said little in public to elaborate on their reasons for leaving. Later, when they started a new studio called Hundred Star Games, they told potential recruits from Rocksteady that they would have the opportunity to make a game free of the mandates and pressures from a corporation like Warner Bros.

Not long after the pair left, Suicide Squad was shown to the world for the first time in a digital PlayStation showcase that revealed 10 minutes of footage. Fans were largely unimpressed and slammed the preview for looking generic and repetitive. One Forbes writer described it as “live service hell.”
Shortly after the showcase, Warner delayed the release again, leading fans to wonder if Rocksteady might pivot away from the uninspired “looter shooter” genre to something else entirely. But it was too late.

In February 2024, Rocksteady released Suicide Squad. Employees were hopeful that players might enjoy individual pieces, such as its beautiful graphics or clever banter. But critics panned the overall experience, ranking it alongside other live-service flops with a 60 out of 100 on Metacritic, and the game failed to reach a wide audience despite a pricy marketing campaign that included network TV commercials.
Despite the painful setback, Warner Bros. isn’t giving up on video games, a $262 billion global industry, according to PwC, that will grow to $312 billion in 2027. During the February meeting in London, Haddad said that Warner Bros. Games was looking to do more collaboration between its dozen studios and that the company was understaffed compared to competing publishers, so job cuts at Rocksteady wouldn’t make sense.

Many of the studio’s employees are now helping to develop a new “director’s cut” version of Hogwarts Legacy. At the same time, according to people familiar, the studio leaders are looking to pitch a new single-player game, which would return Rocksteady to its roots.

“I think they’ll definitely get another at-bat,” said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. “Hopefully with something more aligned with their demonstrated talents.”
 

saintjules

Gold Member
I understand making what you're passionate about and what your vision is without having to listen to someone else. As an Artist that's what it's about.

But, when it comes to large budgets, money, people's jobs on the line, take a second to think about what the consumer wants. Because at the end of the day you have to cater to what will sell your product. Your future depends on it. Too many studios are failing.
 
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FunkMiller

Member
The games division was supposed to be a rare bright spot for Zaslav and his investors, particularly following the success of Hogwarts Legacy, an adaptation of the Harry Potter series, which was the best-selling title of 2023 and has sold more than 24 million copies. Instead, Rocksteady delivered a historic dud. For Warner Bros., it was a painful reminder that big, ambitious video games, like blockbuster-style movies, have the potential to amass both huge windfalls and gaping losses.

Hmmm. Wonder what the difference was between the two games......

I hope that the devs at Rocksteady find work quickly when this bankrupt studio goes deservedly under.
 

Jaybe

Member
Beyond the live service issue which is the largest misstep, he failed to mention the contributing narrative and writing shortcomings of the game that were a large turnoff as the game released and people were made aware of the choices made.
 

Punished Miku

Human Rights Subscription Service
  1. Corporate directed them to try the next new thing that makes tons of money, and tie it into their lucrative movie IPs.
  2. Team wasn't experienced with it.
  3. Corporate saw Fornite and told them to put in guns.
  4. Corporate saw GTA Online and told them to put in vehicles.
  5. ???
  6. - $200 million
 
Hmmm. Wonder what the difference was between the two games......

I hope that the devs at Rocksteady find work quickly when this bankrupt studio goes deservedly under.
And still WB is doubling down on GAAS/love service shit. Because apparently it's not good enough to make a game that makes a lot of money once. You have to make a game that will extract every dollar out of your customers for literal years, even though most of those games fail.
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
I love it how the blame is put on the studio co-founders who are no longer in the company. "Blame on the dead" as we say in my country.

Embarrassing piece of "journalism" that doesn't address the purple elephant in the room.
If there's anyone who would prefer to lay the blame solely at the feet of executives at the publisher level if he could, it's Schreier. It would be pretty hard to track exactly who to blame, given that current WB owners at Discovery didn't buy the company until another almost 6 years after Suicide Squad was greenlit.

Sometimes, it actually is the fault of the devs/studio leaders when shit happens. Nowhere in the article does it say that WB forced Rocksteady to do a GaaS. I honestly thought that at least WB execs strongly suggested Suicide Squad after it got canned at WB Montreal, but it seems both decisions were made by Rocksteady entirely. Even their original IP, which is a shock that they were ever even allowed to begin concepting, was multiplayer.

You could tell Rocksteady was bored of Batman by Arkham Knight, but apparently that extended to single player as well. They wanted to stretch past what they did before as "artists", and were trying to be proactive in corporate politicking as execs.
 
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Jaybe

Member
I’m surprised Schreier never did a similar deep dive into Halo Infinite as I’m sure it would be an interesting story.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
A bit weird how in 2016 Walker and Hill unexpectedly switched from prototyping a multiplayer puzzle game called Stoned towards a GAAS shooter based on an IP that nobody really liked except for WB execs.
 

The Cockatrice

I'm retarded?
Rocksteady really shat the bed on this one

No, I think WB did and Rocksteady just retaliated by making this turd. Its why most of the important people there left over the years. Way to shit on Kevin Conroy's legacy with this game. Fuck WB and whoever's in charge.
 
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Saber

Member
This is basically what I said in an another thread. Excutives just keep watching what the biggests money maker trends were and demand their team to go for it, when they have zero experience with it. To the point of the teams questioning desicion, just like people when watched that turd they called gameplay(Captain Boomerang being a prime example). It was doomed to failed, regardless of the sentiment of people who had faith on this game.
And note that the blame still a joint effort.
 
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Fake

Member
So many warns, no one see that coming. At least you can see Capitain Boomerang pointing his middle finger as soon as you enter the game to you
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
Cue someone managing to take away precisely the wrong thing from an article that is readily available to read:
  1. Corporate directed them to try the next new thing that makes tons of money, and tie it into their lucrative movie IPs.

Article:
...the studio’s co-founders Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill, eager to do something different, started working on a prototype of an original multiplayer puzzle-solving game, codenamed Stones.


Around the end of 2016, Walker and Hill told their staff there’d been a change of plans. Stones was out. Suicide Squad was in. According to people who attended the meetings, Hill explained that he saw it as a better opportunity than making something new from scratch and that the company hoped to release the game in 2019 or 2020.

(This quote is curiously disjointed from the point that multiplayer had already been decided, but it still puts the agency on Hill and Walker):

It was a field in which Rocksteady had no prior experience. The Batman: Arkham games were all single-player. Even so, Rocksteady executives soon decided that, in keeping with their parent company’s newfound enthusiasm, Suicide Squad would become an online multiplayer game with live-service content.

Corporate saw Fornite and told them to put in guns.

Article:
Over time, the leaders’ vision kept morphing, most notably switching from an emphasis on melee combat to heavily focusing on guns.

Corporate saw GTA Online and told them to put in vehicles.
Article:
At one point, Hill pitched an elaborate system of vehicles that would allow players to deck out cars with weapons and navigate through the game’s alien-infested streets.

I know we're all busy people with busy lives, but this is a serious societal problem. The article is there to be read, not skimmed and mixed with personal headcanons and biases.
 
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Jaybe

Member
He did

It’s locked under an account but I remember seeing that written at game release and it seemed mostly a puff piece at the time (also short form vs his usual long form work) and hadn’t captured GaaS pipeline failure that lead to the game being mostly abandoned, so those weren’t apparent at the time.
 

Punished Miku

Human Rights Subscription Service
I know we're all busy people with busy lives, but this is a serious societal problem. The article is there to be read, not skimmed and mixed with personal headcanons and biases.
Did you read the end of the article?

Later, when they started a new studio called Hundred Star Games, they told potential recruits from Rocksteady that they would have the opportunity to make a game free of the mandates and pressures from a corporation like Warner Bros.

Read between the lines a tiny bit. Rank and file employees don't hear the wishes of corporate, they tell the managers and the managers execute it. Lay off the smarmy self-satisfied lecturing a little bit.
 

Fake

Member
This here is very important and tell everything bad that is happenig with devs those days:

Several employees adopted the term “toxic positivity” to describe the culture of the company, which discouraged criticism. Leadership didn’t seem worried, they say, even as other traditionally single-player game studios that chased the live-service trend were delivering abysmal results with games such as Anthem (which earned a lowly score of 59 out of 100 on Metacritic), Marvel’s Avengers (67 out of 100) and Redfall (56 out of 100).

Thats the word I looking for years to descrive those dev team. Toxic positivity. The art of bash fans concerns and ignore 100% of the time feedback.
 
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I literally clicked on this thinking they were going to blame people who don't work there anymore and I was right. Almost every article that does a postmortem on a failed video game usually blames managers for not listening or giving them time to fix shit.

"There was no clear vision"
"We didn't have time to fix bugs"
"They kept changing things mid development"

Hill and Walker left the project at the end of 2022. They had a full year to make adjustments before launch like I don't know maybe they could have made the final boss fight with brainiac unique instead of rehashing an old boss fight from earlier in the game?

Let's not forget about the post launch content that released for the game, the fact that some of it is releasing later than expected and what released has been underwhelming to outright laughable (The amount of grinding it takes to unlock Joker and well Joker's design itself is a joke). Plus if the leaks are true about what is to come for season 2 involving Mr. Freeze its doesn't get any better.

The fact is Rocksteady doesn't have the creative talent to turn the game around and they don't have the talent to make a good game period.
 
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ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
Did you read the end of the article?
Yes I did. But it doesn't negate anything else said in the article that directly attributes mistakes to them, and there's a lot more than what I quoted. It reads to me like Hill and Walker fleeing the ship after deluding themselves for 7 years that they knew what they were doing, and absolved themselves of any blame to a public that doesn't know or understand the full story.

The reality is that being owned by a publisher absolutely means that there is corporate pressure. Why the fuck wouldn't their be? They chose to sell the studio. It's the publisher's money that's being spent, the publishers IP and resources being leveraged.

However, almost none of them are top down dictatorships, and Hill and Walker clearly had influence and autonomy. There were less prestigious studios at WB that greenlit games around that time that managed to stay on the single player route. Otherwise, Hogwarts wouldn't have come out last year, and Wonder Woman (SP only from its announcement) wouldn't be on the way, wherever it is in development.

Read between the lines a tiny bit. Rank and file employees don't hear the wishes of corporate, they tell the managers and the managers execute it. Lay off the smarmy self-satisfied lecturing a little bit.
There's nothing smarmy about it. You decided to infer something contrary to what the article explicates throughout because of one paragraph. Fortnite and GTA are not mentioned once in the article, you brought that up. Strikes me as odd that you would do so if you'd actually read it, since Destiny is explicitly mentioned and ripe for quoting if you want your like-farming name drop.
 

Punished Miku

Human Rights Subscription Service
Yes I did. But it doesn't negate anything else said in the article that directly attributes mistakes to them, and there's a lot more than what I quoted. It reads to me like Hill and Walker fleeing the ship after deluding themselves for 7 years that they knew what they were doing, and absolved themselves of any blame to a public that doesn't know or understand the full story.

The reality is that being owned by a publisher absolutely means that there is corporate pressure. Why the fuck wouldn't their be? They chose to sell the studio. It's the publisher's money that's being spent, the publishers IP and resources being leveraged.

However, almost none of them are top down dictatorships, and Hill and Walker clearly had influence and autonomy. There were less prestigious studios at WB that greenlit games around that time that managed to stay on the single player route. Otherwise, Hogwarts wouldn't have come out last year, and Wonder Woman (SP only from its announcement) wouldn't be on the way, wherever it is in development.


There's nothing smarmy about it. You decided to infer something contrary to what the article explicates throughout because of one paragraph. Fortnite and GTA are not mentioned once in the article, you brought that up. Strikes me as odd that you would do so if you'd actually read it, since Destiny is explicitly mentioned and ripe for quoting if you want your like-farming name drop.
It's a joke post, but yes I inferred. I think for myself all the time.

Yes, a lot of your posts are smarmy. Just gets annoying. But please, go on correcting everyone's illiteracy for the good of society since you're so much smarter than everyone else because only you can read things exactly literally and never think for yourself.

images

"he thinks that corporations mandating GAAS games for money are looking at the top 2 games. what a moron, if you do a 'control F' search it doesn't say Fortnite even once. our society is doomed. (sips tea with pinky finger extended) maybe I can ask my friends if they want me to come help them learn to read again this weekend, my whole schedule is totally free for some reason ...."
- ProtoByte ProtoByte
 
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The article doesn't give any actual insight into why the two studio heads departed in 2022. It doesn't make sense why they would up and leave at that point, by the article's own logic. The whole thing reads mostly like vague made-up nonsense.
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
The article doesn't give any actual insight into why the two studio heads departed in 2022. It doesn't make sense why they would up and leave at that point, by the article's own logic. The whole thing reads mostly like vague made-up nonsense.
Schreier or anyone who spoke to wouldn't be able to give details on the mindset of two guys who refused to do any interviews about this, probably for NDA reasons among others.

My read and guess of it is that they wake up and smell the coffee after 5 years of self delusion right on time for a change of owning hands when Discovery bought WB from AT&T in April of 2022. They figure that if they're still on the ship when it sinks upon the game's actual release, they won't have as much credibility to get funding and talent for the new studio that they see a lot of other semi-notable industry vets striking out and making. They resolve to ditch by year's end, leaving the impression that everything lay at WB's feet for how Suicide Squad wound up.
 
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Astray

Member
Schreier or anyone who spoke to wouldn't be able to give details on the mindset of two guys who refused to do any interviews about this, probably for NDA reasons among others.

My read and guess of it was that they wake up and smell the coffee after 5 years of self delusion right on time for a change of owning hands when Discovery bought WB from AT&T in April of 2022. They figure that if they're still on the ship when it sinks upon the game's actual release, they won't have as much credibility to get funding and talent for the new studio that they see a lot of other semi-notable industry vets striking out and making. They resolve to ditch by year's end, leaving the impression that everything lay at WB's feet for how Suicide Squad wound up.
Seems to me like they were part of why the game was a mess. I'm specifically looking at the vehicle system stuff (which is coincidentally something that was in Arkham Knight and took away from the game).
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
Seems to me like they were part of why the game was a mess. I'm specifically looking at the vehicle system stuff (which is coincidentally something that was in Arkham Knight and took away from the game).
That's a great point. Seems like Hill had fascination with vehicles in open worlds. Understandable why, but doing Battank stealth and giving a fucking moped to King Shark when he, for some reason, can Hulk Jump and air dash around the place doesn't make any sense.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Over time, the leaders’ vision kept morphing, most notably switching from an emphasis on melee combat to heavily focusing on guns. The change left some staff members wondering why protagonists such as Captain Boomerang, known for fighting with his namesake weapon, would suddenly pivot to gunplay.
Nothing better than a superhero game where you go around shooting enemy soldiers and helicopters with purple blob weak points with assault rifles.
 
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Cyberpunkd

Member
David Haddad, the head of video games for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., visited the London offices of subsidiary Rocksteady Studios in mid-February for an all-hands meeting. While previous gatherings with the executive had been peppered with tactful euphemisms, this time Haddad was blunt, according to two people briefed on his remarks.
Truly the worst kind of manager. Will not tell you what's wrong or even steer you in a correct direction, will just wait for you to fail, then fire you.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
At one point, Hill pitched an elaborate system of vehicles that would allow players to deck out cars with weapons and navigate through the game’s alien-infested streets. But each of the four playable characters were already outfitted with modes of traveling, leading to more doubts among staffers. Why, they wondered, would players using Deadshot or King Shark bother with a motorcycle when they could just soar through the air? After months of experimentation and prototyping, the vehicle system was scrapped.

One of the biggest issues, said people familiar, was that the battles, levels and bosses in a live-service game needed to be designed so players could tackle them over and over again, while Rocksteady was accustomed to telling stories that were only experienced once. Hampered by bloated code, the team struggled to find ways to make these activities feel less tedious and repetitive.
On foot/vehicle fights in streets sounds fine. But when the designers make the game movement jumping rooftop to rooftop like Titanfall or course street battles will be pushed aside. Then, dont make movement skyscraper to skyscraper.

As for repetition, some games got it some dont. Diablo is the most mindless repetition game out there with zero story aside from kill Diablo and all his mini boss buddies. People enjoy mashing enemies and loot ad nauseum.
 
They missed woke character design, on top of GaaS. This is not what the players wanted out of rocksteady, ever at any point. They can spend big money on games, but they need to test what the market is looking for.

Clearly, a game like Hogwarts Legacy was what people wanted. A single player adventure that was not GaaS.
 
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Cyberpunkd

Member
  1. Corporate directed them to try the next new thing that makes tons of money, and tie it into their lucrative movie IPs.
  2. Team wasn't experienced with it.
  3. Corporate saw Fornite and told them to put in guns.
  4. Corporate saw GTA Online and told them to put in vehicles.
  5. ???
  6. - $200 million
Did you read the article?

Staff members sometimes waited weeks or months for Hill, the studio’s perfectionist co-founder and director of the game, to review their work, said the people familiar, creating a bottleneck that further slowed development. He scrapped big chunks of the script and struggled to convey his evolving ideas, they said, confessing that he hadn’t spent much time with competing games such as Destiny. The constant delays hurt morale and led staff to fret that they were discarding too much and failing to make real progress.
At one point, Hill pitched an elaborate system of vehicles that would allow players to deck out cars with weapons and navigate through the game’s alien-infested streets. But each of the four playable characters were already outfitted with modes of traveling, leading to more doubts among staffers. Why, they wondered, would players using Deadshot or King Shark bother with a motorcycle when they could just soar through the air? After months of experimentation and prototyping, the vehicle system was scrapped.
It looks to me like a dev with little experience in management or project planning.
 

Ozriel

M$FT
Many of the studio’s employees are now helping to develop a new “director’s cut” version of Hogwarts Legacy. At the same time, according to people familiar, the studio leaders are looking to pitch a new single-player game, which would return Rocksteady to its roots.

I hope people now understand that In the real world, many devs don’t jump straight into making the next game right after release of a game.

Hogwarts Legacy released Q1 2023. They’re currently working on their pitch for their next game that hasn’t yet been greenlit, a year later.
 
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