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Rocksteady hit by layoffs after Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League underperforms

Topher

Identifies as young
Update: Not just the QA department according to Gamesindustry.biz



Sources told our sister site Eurogamer that multiple departments have been affected, with the QA team among the hardest hit.

According to the report, this department has been halved from 33 members of staff to just 15. Eurogamer's sources said senior management has acknowledged that product quality is likely to suffer.

Dismissed staff range from juniors and newcomers to those with more than five years of experience at the studio.

The restructuring that led to these layoffs is said to be directly linked to the low sales of Suicide Squad, which launched in February to mixed critic reviews and player complaints over the live service-style business model.



Original post:

One staff member made redundant while on paternity leave.

Rocksteady staff have told Eurogamer of redundancies at the studio, following the underperformance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

The company's QA department has seen its size almost cut in half over the past month, Eurogamer understands, from 33 team members to 15, with poor sales of Suicide Squad directly cited as a reason for its "restructuring".

The job losses extend outside of QA, too. One staff member posting publicly on social media over the weekend revealed they had been told they were being made redundant in the middle of their paternity leave.

Eurogamer has contacted Suicide Squad publisher Warner Bros. for comment, but has so far not received a response.

Rocksteady staff - who requested to remain anonymous - told Eurogamer that the loss of so many roles in the developer's QA department, including team members with specialised knowledge, would leave their remaining colleagues shouldered with more work.

There has also been an acknowledgement by Rocksteady's senior management that product quality will now suffer as a result, staff say.

Staff members affected by the job cuts include numerous junior staff, but also several team members employed at Rocksteady for more than five years.

Last month, Warner Bros. reported a 41 percent fall in gaming revenue year-on-year due to the "weak performance" of Suicide Squad, after previously saying it had lost $200m on the game. Work continues on Suicide Squad's year of post-launch content, though nothing has been said for what, if anything, will come next.

"Rocksteady's talent is so evident in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it almost overcomes the terrible decision to try and make it," reads Eurogamer's Suicide Squad review.



Better than being closed altogether I guess, but still....

Matthew Broderick GIF




 
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ManaByte

Gold Member
The company's QA department has seen its size almost cut in half over the past month

QA departments are almost usually all temps contracted through a temp agency and are the most fluid department of any studio. Only the most senior of testers are actual employees of the studio and not working for a staffing agency. These "journalists" try to paint them differently because it gets them outrage clicks.
 

JORMBO

Darkness no more
I don't work in game development. But having a large QA department doesn't strike me as something needed for a game that has shipped and isn't doing well enough for much more support.
 

Saber

Member
Is this supposed to surprise?
I'm actually surprised they didn't do that sooner after reporting heavy losses or just killed the entire studio. What in the gods name happens in the head of those people to even think people like characters trashtalking every fucking second, garbage and woke designs, pride crap everywhere and showing middle finger I will never understand.
 
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Da1337Vinci

Member
I am unsure on whether WB will have enough patience till their next game drop.

For the next 4-5 years Rocksteady is just an red number on the sheet.

This is excluding the failure of SS.
 

Chukhopops

Member
I hope they can salvage some of the assets and work they made for SS and make a single player game out of it, like Avengers was used for Guardians of the Galaxy.
One staff member posting publicly on social media over the weekend revealed they had been told they were being made redundant in the middle of their paternity leave.
Really glad to live in a country where that would be illegal.
 

Cyberpunkd

Member
I don't work in game development. But having a large QA department doesn't strike me as something needed for a game that has shipped and isn't doing well enough for much more support.
This is also exactly why every game ships with game-breaking bugs - who needs QA anyway? Just let players beta test the game, we will fix it afterwards.
 

Flabagast

Member
It took exactly 6 - 7 months for layoffs to hit since launch.

Concord might follow the same trajectory. Lets see how these devs will get new job among us talentless freaks.
Not the same level of failure at all. Concord most probably sold 100x less copies than Suicide Squad, and that’s not an exaggeration.

Suicide squad was a flop like it happens every year. Concord is most probably the biggest flop in the videogame industry for the last decade
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
It's not surprising that QA staff are being cut first because QA is always the first team to be reduced and outsourced. It's frustrating because the people who caused the poor reception of the game are likely not going to be fired and those people don't sit on the QA team.
 
I'm sure it's the higher ups who chose this project that are the ones getting sacked?
No the higher ups get a chance to fuck up another project or leave with a bonus. I hope the whole industrie goes into a depression and has to reset itself to what it once was. For gamers by gamers. Those who reluctantly did their job on this project to support themselves or their family, you have my sympathy, the activists, hope you never get a job in the game industry again.
Go fuck yourself.
 

Hot5pur

Member
Playing the game now. It's kinda fun but clearly not what they should have had rocksteady working on. I suppose some companies chasing the GAAS trend will hit it big but others will lose a ton. We will still see this happening as many large publishers will continue to try to get it right after learning from their mistakes
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
"Rocksteady's talent is so evident in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it almost overcomes the terrible decision to try and make it," reads Eurogamer's Suicide Squad review.
I actually fired up my free copy of the game last night and this is so accurate. The game looks pretty solid tech wise, has a lot of depth in mechanics, taking the slow methodical mechanics of the Batman games and amping them up and increasing the scale but without overly simplifying them. It's actually a solid game mechanically it just started with terrible fundamental ideas.
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
The primary reason to let go of QA people is that you have less stuff for them to QA. Suicide Squad is going to go into maintenance mode soon and get shut down and if Rocksteady survives, they won't resurface for a while. They don't need 33 (that number again) people testing anymore.
 
I'm surprised they didn't just shut down the studio to cut costs.
The studio name is tied to proven pedigree, but when I read that key people were leaving, a few years back... I kind of saw the writing on the wall, in terms of the future.
Here we are, 2024. I swear... so many times, I've seen an established studio lose it's key people. Quality usually suffers and the people that replace them don't carry the same creative weight of the ones they are replacing. I feel if this studio puts out one more flop, it's going to get shitcanned. Color me surprised that it already wasn't.
 

JORMBO

Darkness no more
This is also exactly why every game ships with game-breaking bugs - who needs QA anyway? Just let players beta test the game, we will fix it afterwards.
There's a difference between needing QA while working on/supporting a product afterwards and having lots of QA people for a dead game.
 

Sentenza

Member
If we pair up the precedent slow "diaspora" of Rocksteady employees (including the two founders of the studio) and the more recent layoffs, we are probably approaching the point where the current studio remains the one who raised to celebrity with the Arkham series in name only.
 

ManaByte

Gold Member
compared to the colossal failure that game turned out to be that seems very tame so far....

It sounds like it was just downsizing the QA department. What likely happened was some QA temp was let go and their dreams of becoming the next Kojima shattered, so they went home and fired off an angry email to Eurogamer.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
It sounds like it was just downsizing the QA department. What likely happened was some QA temp was let go and their dreams of becoming the next Kojima shattered, so they went home and fired off an angry email to Eurogamer.

Updated the OP. GI.biz says multiple departments were hit.
 

marjo

Member
Once again the regular employees pay the price for the bad decisions by the execs. But in all fairness, I'm sure the execs bonuses will be fractionally smaller than usual.
 
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