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

EDMIX said:
In RockSteady's defense, they were contracted to create this. I feel a lot of the game's issue is this idea of getting a GaaS game out of a narrative concept.
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EDMIX said:
So, this can't really be RockSteady's entire fault, they where hired to create this, blame the publisher for thinking this made sense over a normal single player comic game, the thing this fucking team does well.
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Bro, did you even read the first 4 paragraphs of the article? This is exactly the opposite to what happened.
 
SirKicksalot said:
If you think the game flopped because it's woke, and not because the big gameplay reveal had boomerang guy shooting purple weak spots with an AK47 for gear score +1, you're dumber than the wokies.
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You're forgetting there was a big TLOU2-like leak of Batman getting unceremoniously executed by Harley that got like 10 million views on X shortly before the game's release. That was the final nail in the coffin as gamers saw what the tone and attitude of the game was going to be. Certainly all of the game's problems can not be laid at the feet of woke DEI culture, but to pretend it has nothing to do with it is laughable. It's amazing to me that people can still have their heads in the sand about this stuff. I guess you haven't seen the Mrs Freeze character this game has lined up yet.

Also this Schreier article is definitely damage control by the remaining Rocksteady employees. We're supposed to believe that the entire game is the fault of the guys behind the Arkham trilogy, the very people who weren't willing to stand behind the game's release. I'm sure mistakes were made but at some point they realised their studio had become another modern DEI corporate monster they no longer had any control over and got the hell out of there.
 
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That was a lot of words in the article to say that this was WB and Rocksteady's Redfall

Maybe GaaS games should be made by studios which specialize in online multiplayer games instead of forcing studios with single player pedigrees like Arkane Austin (RIP) and Rocksteady to try and make them badly which kills studio morale, drives the best employees to leave, results in the game being delayed, and it's a piece of shit when released
 
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Now i wanna play this trainwreck. Atleast to try it out before it's offline. Is it available for free on any services?
 
the issue is the same that is affecting the movie industry...following the trend is a safest bet, but also comes with a lot more competition. The idea of the bean counters is that you can just throw money at the issue and it will be solved by others down the line....it's basically gambling

ther funny thing, is that the most successful entities in the gaas ecosystem started as relatively cheap projects that had a strong vision behind them...it's not the kind of arena where you can just count on production values a lot...if you wanna put people in a skinner box you need the gameplay to be good or unique enough so that they not only decide to enter the box, but stay there.
 
Releasing an article about the biggest flop of the year right in the middle of the year feels a bit weird. Just like Gotys, such things should be released when a year is actually over.

Already fighting for that position in a year with Redfall (which is imho maybe somewhat more important since it showed that MS did not really tighten the quality control screws properly, unlike Foamstars or Forspoken, that is first party after all and also not like Destruction Allstars a rushed early gen game) or Skull and Bones is also something. Did we ever have so many big flops in one year ever? With other gaas struggling too. Finals eg? Overwatch2 never succeeding as the first one and old TF2 getting into trouble and a reaction just these days. Feels like more bad is to happen in that overcrowded space.
 
Regular devs did best they could but i got 0 mercy for publusher and ppl at the head of the studio who decided on that useless genre trying to chase fortnite money on WB/DC Comics licence, such ppl only gonna learn while suffering huge financial loss.

Hopefully next game from the dev team will be sequel to critiqually acclaimed Arkham series which we all love and rememeber- single player ofc, and featuring batman or Justice League/Superman, engine/tech itself is solid and im sure can be reused after tweaking :)

Bad producs bombing hard is the only way- us- customers- can convince pubs/devs what games we want/need to be made, if such a digital shit as this one succeded we would have experienced next 5-10 years of GAAS instead of putting that very talented dev team into game dev that actually has hopes for a success and can provide us with high quality/innovation/fun gameplay experience, instead of shooting as a fricken cpt boomerang ;X
 
It's funny isn't it.....you have all these execs,money people,experienced game devs etc making a game that most of us on here declared would be an absolute bomb the day we heard about it.....you do have to wonder how these people keep down jobs at all.
 
LazyParrot said:
Being "too woke" was the least of this game's problems lol.
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It is standard scenario with those kinds of games, when dev studio's top priority is diversity and woke agenda, it means game quality/fun/innovation takes backseat or is forgotten totally, it never ends well but what can we do, gotta let devs/pubs make their mistakes and learn hardway, otherwise they will keep sitting in that bubble thinking they can do no wrong- sometimes its good for industry to actually get humbled :)
 
PeteBull said:
It is standard scenario with those kinds of games, when dev studio's top priority is diversity and woke agenda, it means game quality/fun/innovation takes backseat or is forgotten totally, it never ends well but what can we do, gotta let devs/pubs make their mistakes and learn hardway, otherwise they will keep sitting in that bubble thinking they can do no wrong- sometimes its good for industry to actually get humbled :)
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Their top priority was jumping on the multiplayer GAAS train in a saturated market, with a full-priced release, no less. If anything did them in, it's that. You could have removed every molecule of wokeness from this game and it still would have bombed.
 
LazyParrot said:
Their top priority was jumping on the multiplayer GAAS train in a saturated market, with a full-priced release, no less. If anything did them in, it's that. You could have removed every molecule of wokeness from this game and it still would have bombed.
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Totally agree here, and like i said, no mercy from me, i only hope it will be good lesson for other devs, they will think twice before trying to catch that GaaS train ;P
 
kyussman said:
It's funny isn't it.....you have all these execs,money people,experienced game devs etc making a game that most of us on here declared would be an absolute bomb the day we heard about it.....you do have to wonder how these people keep down jobs at all.
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The worst part is the player feedback is staring them right in the face... But choose to ignore reality
 
As soon as I heard Rocksteady was making a Suicide Squad game and that it was going to be a live-service game, I immediately knew they were in trouble.

But you can't tell those C-suite suits anything. They always know more than everyone else.

What an incredibly wasted opportunity, from top to bottom.
 
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It never fails to make me chuckle when gamers equivalence their perspective with that of people who are working on things every day of their working lives for actual years.
It's such a different experience for Devs because they deal with effectively hundreds of iterations upon the same ideas. It only sounds silly or unreasonable to hope that things gel together suddenly at the end of the cycle if you haven't had the experience of that exact thing happening.
The reality is it's not uncommon for a game to go from zero to hero due to minor tweaks and changes late on. And as I noted when you've already seen many variations over the course of years... It rarely feels like a leap.
 
captainnapalm said:
You're forgetting there was a big TLOU2-like leak of Batman getting unceremoniously executed by Harley that got like 10 million views on X shortly before the game's release. That was the final nail in the coffin as gamers saw what the tone and attitude of the game was going to be. Certainly all of the game's problems can not be laid at the feet of woke DEI culture, but to pretend it has nothing to do with it is laughable. It's amazing to me that people can still have their heads in the sand about this stuff. I guess you haven't seen the Mrs Freeze character this game has lined up yet.
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We're attributing killing Batman to wokeness?
By that token, wasn't Zack Snyder woke for killing Superman? Or was it maybe that he's an edgelord thinking that he's mixing things up by killing off the most recognizable characters in the world?

After all, this game kills John Stewart (one of two major Green Lanterns that just happens to be black) and strips him to his underwear, also having him beef with the only other black guy in the game for no discernable reason other than the preconceptions of devs who probably think themselves "woke". It even kills off that androgynous Wonder Woman interpretation without much ceremony.

Point is that reason would suggest that killing off Batman and the rest of the Justice League was a case of shock value many many years too late. When people were going off about how Rocksteady was shitting on Kevin Conroy's legacy as if they planned for him to die in the 7+ years this game was in development or some shit, it just sounded stupid.

captainnapalm said:
Also this Schreier article is definitely damage control by the remaining Rocksteady employees. We're supposed to believe that the entire game is the fault of the guys behind the Arkham trilogy, the very people who weren't willing to stand behind the game's release. I'm sure mistakes were made but at some point they realised their studio had become another modern DEI corporate monster they no longer had any control over and got the hell out of there.
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When you're the leader for 6 out of 7 years of development, you're going to get a disproportionate amount of the blame.

I don't know what percentage is accurate for that, but cmon.
 
ProtoByte said:
We're attributing killing Batman to wokeness?
By that token, wasn't Zack Snyder woke for killing Superman? Or was it maybe that he's an edgelord thinking that he's mixing things up by killing off the most recognizable characters in the world?

After all, this game kills John Stewart (one of two major Green Lanterns that just happens to be black) and strips him to his underwear, also having him beef with the only other black guy in the game for no discernable reason other than the preconceptions of devs who probably think themselves "woke". It even kills off that androgynous Wonder Woman interpretation without much ceremony.

Point is that reason would suggest that killing off Batman and the rest of the Justice League was a case of shock value many many years too late. When people were going off about how Rocksteady was shitting on Kevin Conroy's legacy as if they planned for him to die in the 7+ years this game was in development or some shit, it just sounded stupid.


When you're the leader for 6 out of 7 years of development, you're going to get a disproportionate amount of the blame.

I don't know what percentage is accurate for that, but cmon.
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It's all in the execution, obviously. The idea of the Suicide Squad killing an evil Batman could theoretically work, but not in the way it was done. The game constantly takes shots at the Arkham series, or feels it needs to apologise for the treatment of characters like Harley. It turned Poison Ivy into a de-aged Greta Thunberg stand-in. It's turning Mr Freeze into a butch Mrs Freeze. It has Lex Luthor talking about "toxic masculinity".

You're not going to convince me that's what the Arkham guys wanted, and we have good reason to believe they obviously didn't since they abandoned the studio they founded. They left almost 18 months before the game came out, and may have been checked out for some time before that for all we know. That's plenty of time for the final product to turn into something they never would have approved.
 
WB should've had them make an open world Blade Runner game in UE5 in the style of the original movie (or even a wide-linear Matrix game).
 
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We Did It Smiling GIF
 
captainnapalm said:
It's all in the execution, obviously. The idea of the Suicide Squad killing an evil Batman could theoretically work, but not in the way it was done. The game constantly takes shots at the Arkham series, or feels it needs to apologise for the treatment of characters like Harley. It turned Poison Ivy into a de-aged Greta Thunberg stand-in. It's turning Mr Freeze into a butch Mrs Freeze. It has Lex Luthor talking about "toxic masculinity".
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That's video game employees for ya.

Traditionally, bringing personal life to work or vice versa (dont bring work home with ya) is something people hope doesnt happen. Work is work. And personal stuff is separate.

Leave it to modern day drama queens in media (video games included) who do their best spreading their personal agendas at the office and to products.
 
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Camreezie said:
Listen to what your audience wants and then you wont take a 200 million dollar L
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Easier said than done.

Media is one of those things where it seems someone (or a group) comes up with their idea on a napkin and thinks it's the best TV show, book, movie or video game ever. Even if it's a $100M or $200M budget product it doesn't matter. They hope to get funded and just do their own thing. They just assume if they make it it's the greatest product since sliced bread and the only research they do is when the product is basically done and perhaps they ask for some final testing and tweaks. But the core product is already done and they got to run with it. Then the product releases and they hope it sells.

I bet you any money Nabisco puts more resources and research testing to see if a single new flavour of Oreo has good prospects for success than any big game company puts towards all their new games combined.
 
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Zazlav is one of the worst ceos. They've had several brain dead suits that have no finger on the pulse of the audience.

So fucking lame these assholes just care about their stock options and share holders. They completely cripple their studios and then loss a ton of money. And then instead of releasing batgirl for instance they take a write off.

Just a loser mentality from zazlav. Not only that but he refused to go up $500 million f0r the nba rights and now nbc has it. That's a gigantic fuck up. Tbs and tnt don't have enough shows to make a profit without nba.
 
The whole dev saga reads like what you'd present in a project management course as a negative example.

GaaS are difficult to pull off successfully, at the best of times. They have a higher chance to stick the landing if created by a studio who is aware of the intricacies of multiplayer. Seems like this was not the case here.
The choice of franchise was also bad. Suicide Squad has generally bomba-ed whenever anybody tried putting out something, so the odds were against a new installment of this IP from the start. I'm gonna go on a small rant, and state that the only part of that franchise anybody genuinely gives a shit about is Harley, and, in 80% of instances, it's only because of coomers imagining her "an' den dey hyu'cked"-ing Ivy (thanks in no small part to the animated series). Situation which the game almost-deliberately removes, by making Ivy a small kid.

It was bad calls, 100% of the time, all the way down.
 
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The reason for Suicide Squad's failure is definitely not a multi-billion merger corporation using the decades old intellectual property created by comic book artists to try and create an endless revenue stream with a half-assed shallow piece of shit instead of making a quality product that people want to buy. It does not simply make sense to me.

The reason why Suicide Squad failed is the existence of women and minorities in the gaming industry. Every problem in the world, no matter how big or small, must be created by people I personally find annoying.
 
Why is it that we never know the names of the suits who actually "advised", or ordered a developer to make a certain type of game against the developers own judgment??

Who are these suits? Maybe these "journalists" should be calling out these scabs by name.
 
TL;DR: It's a sequence of retards being retarded.

First: WB management for not overseeing Rocksteady properly. Although I can understand that after the Arkham games, WB were probably trusting Rocksteady with whatever.
Second: The founders of Rocksteady for trying to make a live-service game without having any clue on how to do it. And also for their inability to properly communicate with the staff. Making it a live-service game was the idea of the founders, not WB.

Result: -200 Million.
 
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"Rocksteady delivered a historic dud."

No, Warner Bros management delivered this shit. Rocksteady could have a delivered another awesome game like their others if they had been left to make their own game.
 
This bump reminded me of how much I hate SSKTJL.

Also, I don't think Schreier is correct. I'm certain that when any game gives off culture war virtue signal vibes, it causes less sales of the game.

The target audience for gaming is "everyone" but unfortunately for Schreier and his neophytes the actual audience for core gaming is us.
 
Zacfoldor said:
Also, I don't think Schreier is correct. I'm certain that when any game gives off culture war virtue signal vibes, it causes less sales of the game.

The target audience for gaming is "everyone" but unfortunately for Schreier and his neophytes the actual audience for core gaming is us.
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well-damn.gif
 
Couple of months later and we already have a new champion, with a runner up star wars game.

2024 is like the year of the punished gamer. We'll rise from the ashes with our space marines and our astrobots to forge a new path.
 
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