‘Suicide Squad’ game plagued by delays, morphing vision, Bloomberg says

Warner Bros. Discovery’s video game “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,” which came out earlier this year to disappointing sales results, had a seven-year-long tumultuous development cycle, with the project plagued by a constantly shifting vision, a culture of rigid perfectionism, and a genre pivot that the studio was not prepared for, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports, citing interviews with nearly two dozen people. Rocksteady, the studio behind “Suicide Squad” and the “Batman: Arkham” series, had no prior experience in so-called live services games, which “Suicide Squad” ended up being, and the studio management’s vision for the game kept morphing over time, including switching from an emphasis on melee combat to guns, the author says. Despite internal concerns within Rocksteady about the state of the game, Warner Bros. executives kept praising the graphics during development and said they expected the game to kickstart a billion-dollar gaming franchise, the author notes.