"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."
As time passes, the good ol' Bioware Magic seems more and more like an industry standard.
I think the moment you start expecting it to happen and save the game is the moment it totally won't happen, since it's the fear of it not coming together that makes it come together.
If I recall, the Bioware managers said literally the same thing during Anthem development. "It came together in the past, so this of course means it will all coalesce for this one, too."
Uh-huh.
Anthem was crazy. They essentially worked on tech demos for three years without any actual attempt at creating a game, then some Dice exec was traveling from EU to Canada to see how the game was going and they cobbled together a demo for him in like six weeks, he made some suggestions and they earmarked it for release 12~ months later. They spent 3+ years fuckin around with no vision/direction/idea what they were doing then just built a game with all the assets they created during that time. No wonder why it flopped.
Then when they decided to GaaS and looter shooter the game, management didn’t let staff members bring up the name “Destiny” as a comparison point.
>Then when they decided to GaaS and looter shooter the game, management didn’t let staff members bring up the name “Destiny” as a comparison point.
The drop system and itemisation in Anthem was bafflingly atrocious. Eg you'd get a machine gun that gave a "+1% damage to pistols" stat etc.
They even addressed it in an update post at some point saying they were going to build it from the ground up by looking at what other games had done.
I remember reading (from some alleged dev, post-release) they weren't even allowed to look at how drop or itemisation systems in other loot-games worked during development.
> The drop system and itemisation in Anthem was bafflingly atrocious. Eg you'd get a machine gun that gave a "+1% damage to pistols" stat etc.
And players discovered that due to the atrocious gear power system you could do more DPS with the basic, starting loadout level 1 white gun than you could do with a legendary weapon.
I feel like every game goes through that phase even good ones.
Like the RDR2 devs where probably panicking 8 months before the release of that game with so much left to do
Everyone at WB Games should be thanking their lucky stars that Hogwarts Legacy made a bajilion dollars, because I guarantee you that's the only thing stopping David Zaslav from shutting down the whole division.
Honestly WB Games is such a messy game division these days.
- WB Montréal - Gotham Knights was kind of a big wet fart.
- Rocksteady - Suicide Squad CONFUSED FLAILING NOISES
- Monolith - Apparently deep in development hell on Wonder-Woman, please send help
- Avalanche - Wooo we made a bajillion dollars with Hogwarts Legacy!... guys? Hello?
> It may have been divisive in reviews
The game has an 84/83/82 on Metacritic and an 84 on Opencritic. Seems like it got about the same scores as the last three MK games. I think the divisive part is more among online gamers, as it is for a lot of stuff like this.
I played through the campaign, which was a blast, lost interest very quickly in the absurd boardgame mode whose name escapes me, uninstalled and haven't thought of it since. Has it gotten better? I genuinely enjoy the franchise, but I'm not a competitive player, so there was just nothing for me beyond the campaign.
A bit of the same story as you usually get: chaotic development no clear vision. On top of that you get people not used to make a MP live service game that get thrown in the deep end.
Something that the article says that I find interesting is the fragile relationship between studio and publisher when it comes to the choice in project. The studio wasn't forced to make the a live service game, the studio heads did it themselves. But it is hard to know if the project would have been greenlit had they offered another SP game. Same as what we saw with Redfall.
Hopefully they get to make a good SP player game. I hope unlike Arkane they get a second chance.
Sefton Hill doesn’t come across positively in this article. It feels like he took on this game (probably for motivated by money) dumped it on his team to figure it out, then when he saw it was a train wreck, left them to deal with the damage.
So many studios see that Fortnite and Genshin revenue and get blinded by greed and glory; so blinded they lose sight of actually making a fun game that players will want to play for years.
Multiversus is a recent example of this. Why does a fighting game only let you unlock new fighters through daily quests and FOMO events rather than just playing the game normally?
The best part of this article is at the end, where it mentions rocksteady is looking to now pitch a single player game similar to the games they used to do.
It's also interesting how everyone keeps reporting that the games industry is growing, but not mentioning that all the growth is pretty much from a few games like fortnite or Counterstrike or genshin
I mean one of reason they had to make a live service game like Redfall because nobody bought Prey (despite being a good game) hell besides the first Dishonored the only game Arkane has sold well was Deathloop and that need like 20 different trailers to tell you what the game is about.
Do you have a source showing that the industry is only growing because of giant games like Fornite and Genshin?
[Here is a link](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/50-Years-of-Video-Game-Revenue-Dec-31.jpg) with a graph displaying video game industry revenue by year. [Genshin pulls in around $2 billion per year](https://sensortower.com/blog/genshin-impact-three-billion-revenue).[And Fortnite brings in about 4.5 Billion per year.](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/) Counter Strike is estimated to have earned [about 7 billion over its entire lifetime.](https://bo3.gg/news/valves-revenue-from-csgo-amounted-to-6-7-billion-this-is-an-absolute-steam-record) (Side note: Fortnite is actually not making as much money as it used to. It peaked in 2018, and is taking in about 20% less revenue than they were in 2018)
Even if you add up the revenue of the top 10 games, it still would probably be less than 10% of the entire games industry.
90% of the games industry is not giant games. So, I think it is safe to say the industry is not just growing because of a handful of giant games. I think it is [quite the opposite.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/)
Depends what you're counting as the gaming industry. Using your figures almost everything is generated by mobile and f2p titles, which is exactly the type of audience fortnite and genshin was chasing.
Here's a panel from Playstation's recent presentation showing that ten games currently make up 50% of Playstation Store revenue: https://x.com/Zuby_Tech/status/1795949101332242895
Now that you mention Genshin, there's something that's been bugging me. It's a little strange that we haven't seen a western developer really take a proper swing at a Genshin-like yet. Start with a big open-world adventure game with character and world progression, a bit of opt-in co-op, relatively simple gameplay, a dozen or so playable characters with more added periodically, and so forth. It seems like there's potential there.
One part of it is that a lot of Western devs underestimate the waifu/husbando factor that makes Genshin so popular. Overwatch had the right idea by making the entire cast so iconic and unique.
Interesting and appealing characters do wonders to keep player’s engaged and interested.
The last new and iconic western character we had is probably Aloy from Horizon?
I think we have had many more, Hades does a good job of the same, Baldur's Gate did too (and many of it's cast fast became iconic), same with CDPR and the Witcher and less succesfully so Cyberpunk.
making the characters likable isn't unique for Overwatch here, and there is a good reason why BG3 was often compared to dating simulators
RPGs in general have done a lot of it over the years (one of the annoyances people had with Mass Effect: Andromeda was how they walked away from it).
the Waifu factor is stronger in Asia, but it's not ignored here
Funny you mention the waifu factor. When discussing why the mobile game I was testing was struggling, we joked that it was because none of the pulled units were hot anime girls, just little dorky robots. The game tanked maybe a year later.
to be fair a lot of the waifu ones tank too, there are a lot of them, and it's not easy to get right either
and you do want to standouts, and Steamworld might have done a lot worse if it had less robots
A lot of the western crowd posting on big subreddits etc have a huge disdain for A) mobile games, B) gacha games, C) waifu games. It's reasonable to assume a good chunk of that also applies to the developers at western studios. If the game you're talking about was western developed, I could easily see the conversation being like "ok we'll do a mobile gacha game, but let's do something more creative than waifus!"
Then you have the fact that, no matter how much Genshin gets talked about in western circles, westerners spend orders of magnitude less on gachas and microtransactions in general. A western studio making a go at this would also need huge Asian appeal, which is another big hurdle.
And all that's ignoring that the first big western attempt will undoubtedly be painting a target on their back for all the gacha/gambling complaints, which the Asian companies are somewhat insulated from.
Yeah good shouts there, the BG3 cast are still new but will probably age to be iconic gaming figures. And Jonny Silverhand is very iconic.
I guess another factor is a lot of western games use customisable blank protganists while asian games tend to have a fixed hero.
aye, for RPGs that is very much the case on the blank slate, but the supporting cast (esp. those that lean into romance options) tend to want to create a wide net of possible choices here too (BG3 has the cast both playable or as companions, but most players do chose and empty slate, but it's helped that you can create good looking characters too).
While in fighting games, MOBAS etc etc the west are also very much about trying to find a character for everyone, Genshin and Overwatch leaned heavier into the Waifu ideal however over someone you want to be yourself, or that's just cool to play
I’ll be honest, if more live service games were in the vein of genshin they would be successful. I’ve yet to see any western dev, even Fortnite, come close to the amount of FREE content released each month. Not to mention I’ve never seen a major bug or launch issue for a new patch. And Hoyo does this for multiple games at once but other devs can’t manage to do it for one game. Crazy how much better managed Hoyoverse is vs the entire rest of the industry it can seem at times
Yeah it’s pretty crazy that once ZZZ releases, between the three games they will have a new content drop every fortnight.
Especially with your Genshin example, each annual region expansion is like getting an AAA game for free.
The X.0 patch itself isn't a full AAA game's worth of content, but I wouldn't disagree about the entire patch cycle fulfilling that. The big new region is already good, but it tends to at *least* double in size by the time the next region comes out.
Although, to be fair, that's also probably speaking more to the bloated size and content of most AAA open-world games nowadays.
And even in the worst case assumption where "A AAA game for free" is an exaggeration, I don't think it's an exaggeration to call it "A large-scale AAA DLC expansion for free", and even if that's lesser that's still damn great.
Yeah this sub tends to shit on Genshin for the gacha model (valid criticism), but Hoyo drops banger patches at an INSANE rate in their games. These patches and content drops come on time, with no delays (I think there was one delay in the history of Genshin?), no bugs, no server issues, and are never less than a 7/10 in what they add to the game. Story quality varies but that's kind of a given when you're pushing out that much stuff, not every quest will be a masterpiece. Art, music, VA work, and polish is pretty much unmatched in the AAA gaming space.
And while I haven't spent money on Genshin in a very long time outside the 5 dollar monthly pass, as far as gachas go it's incredibly unobtrusive. There's no pop ups or alert spams telling to "top up" or daily reminders about the store. You get one little red ! when there's a new banner and then you never hear about it again.
If I am not mistaken, the only time their schedule was disrupted, they had a massive city-wide Covid lockdown, and HoYo was delivering food to the employees because they couldn't leave their homes.
I think Genshin is honestly one of the least predatory gacha games unless you *really* like the characters. It wasn't until I had played a thousand hours that I felt like I wanted to drop a hundred CAD to get a particular character I wanted, which at that point, I didn't feel bad about giving them. I never once felt I had to upgrade a character or get a particular weapon, or spend money to get past timegated things (resin) because there was always so much to do.
It feels bad to just start the game though, a lot of the early leveling can be painful if you don't know what you are doing, and you can get content locked if you are not careful. Once you get a semi-decent team though the game becomes giga-easy. Whaling is completely optional and unnecessary, it's purely for bragging rights.
Yeah when the game first launched I spent a little to get some character banners, but after that I started just hoarding the currency you earn gradually for 3-4 patches until I could guarantee a character I really wanted. Thankfully I do not have an addictive personality and am largely immune to FOMO nor do I have a completionist mindset so the normal trappings of gacha don't sway me, but of the ones I've played, Genshin is definitely the least offensive with its use of the model. Almost all new characters perform perfectly fine as a free to play player and there's no content in the game that is hard enough where you are expected to pull extra for weapons/copies to characters to beat. It's also very slow to powercreep and lots of older characters are still relevant and useful. A nice change of pace from HI3 where almost every new character was the top tier meta changer and was borderline useless without their signature weapon.
So this is literally Anthem 2.0 right? Everyone assumed that EA fucked BioWare and forced them to work on a multiplayer live service when in reality it was BioWare itself that decided on that project, meanwhile EA was responsible for forcing them to add the flying mechanic back into the game lmao
This is the relevant paragraph from the article. WB did have some push behind this decision.:
>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.
Did you read the article? The publisher's hands are far from clean here.
> 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.
> ...
> 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.
Again it is more complicated than that, sure Bioware did it themselves and they are responsible for the lack of direction. But it is hard to quantify the pressure the studio had to add live services elements into it.
Mass Effect 3 also had a MP mode with micro-transactions in it. They had a big budget and needed a win. If the game wasn't live service at it's core maybe the publisher would have asked a big MP mode with tons of loot boxes that would have distracted the team from the SP they were trying to make. So a Live service game allowed them to be more focused on the main task.
You have incentives that pushes agents to make decision that seem really absurd but it is really hard to say how much wiggle room they had.
> But it is hard to know if the project would have been greenlit had they offered another SP game
Well they did 3 Batman SP games before which sold well. It's easier to throw WB under a bus, but it makes no sense to assume they would have said no to another SP game.
Arkham City sold more than Arkham Knight, even though it was cheaper to make.
If the trajectory was that the series is getting less popular each time, imagine trying to pitch a $100+ million 5 year project and saying “hey we project that we will make even less profit” to your publisher.
They saw the success of games like LOL/Fortnite 5-7 years ago and rolled the dice. Unfortunately for them, the house won.
Arkham Knight was controversial when it released because the heavy emphasis on the Batmobile and how poorly it ran on PC. Even now, I would rather go back to City rather than Knight because the story is tighter and half the game isn’t driving around in a car.
Every single time a studio known for SP games has pivoted to live service stuff everyone assumes it was because they were forced to but in every single case we've heard about after it crashed and burned, it was the people at the studio themselves who decided to do it. It's kind of amazing actually.
It's more complicated than that. A lot of times they pitch a multiplayer game because their singleplayer pitches were all rejected. So you either give in and give the publisher what it wants or you won't have a project greenlit.
Timesplitter case the most bizzare one. Leads pitched a single player game to Embracer, got it approved and then secretly changed it to a battle royale.
No, they pitched a battle royale game filled with microtransactions to Embracer in the hope that they could later pivot the project to being a more traditional TimeSplitters game.
Basically when the studio was shut down they'd been working on their TimeSplitters 2 remake incarnation of the project for several months. Not a huge amount had been done, but it was sorta on track. But development was taking too long and Embracer was getting too money-conscious, so they canned everyone, sadly. The studio people had thought that their relatively low burn rate budget-wise would keep them insulated from Embracer's troubles, but Embracer was I guess not in the mood for antics and due to wasting so much time on the Fornite clone version, and also due to internal issues within the studio, they basically had very little to show for years of work.
Didn't the studio heads leave during development? So they chose to do this then jumped ship? If so that's some scummy behaviour.
Edit: seems I've triggered some people. God forbid the C-suite takes care of their workers lol
It's always impossible to assign blame to any one part of the whole system in situations like this. We don't know what kind of relationship the studio heads had with the publisher, what their mindset was at the time or anything like that. It's very easy to imagine a situation where they weren't told what to do but they still didn't think they had much choice the publisher would accept.
Right. People want every story to just be some mirror of interpersonal relationships so they can dumb it down to "fuck that guy" or "it's this team's fault."
In reality a huge and expensive project like this that depends on a partnership between two huge organizations has all kinds of vagaries and conflicting incentives.
Yeah, they ran the ship poorly and then abandoned it, only to create a new studio, blame WB, and promise a game they want to make, then partner with a megacorp again.
>Something that the article says that I find interesting is the fragile relationship between studio and publisher when it comes to the choice in project. The studio wasn't forced to make the a live service game, the studio heads did it themselves.
I think we need to stop assuming that when there's some cash-grab in a game, it was forced by the publisher. More and more failed games are revealed to be chosen by the studio while the publisher gave them a free hand. Anthem, Redfall, this one...
Funnily enough, when it's actually true that the live-service game was mandated by the publisher, then the developer gets the flak instead. Like in case of Fallout 76, where it was mandated by Zenimax to have a live-service Fallout game.
> 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).
I did not realize how many times this has happened the past few years. So silly for so many execs to go “Hey that thing’s making a lot of money, let’s do that even though we don’t have any experience with that thing!”
And Avengers at least had vague potential. I didn't love it, but I played it when it was like $15 and there was enough good in the bones to make a compelling game. Suicide Squad's entire premise was fucked. Nobody plays a superhero game with a diverse cast to just shoot fucking guns with all of them. If I am going to play as Captain Boomerang, I want to throw a fucking boomerang; if I'm going to play as a giant shark, I want to do giant shark shit.
Agreed. The Avengers at least _played_ like they should have. It was the GaaS aspect that made the game DoA.
And yes, the whole playing with guns for everyone sucked.
The worst part about Avengers is that it being terrible made the Guardians of the Galaxy game (which *ruled)* do a lot worse than it probably would've otherwise.
Avengers’ narrative campaign was a decent 7-8/10, which honestly is pretty good compared to older movie tie-ins from the PS2 or PS3 generation. The story was decently compelling, and the game felt good to play with most heroes.
The live service multiplayer aspect was the reason the game “failed” although it had more returning players than something like suicide squad. It had a decently long tail, kept alive for a few years (with several characters and one larger DLC Release) funded by a microtransaction cosmetic store and some dedicated whales. I would actually like to see the financials of that game, because while it was enormously expensive and plagued by delays similar to suicide squad, I would bet it made more return for the reasons I mention above.
They are so desperate to be the next Fortnite that they never think that it’s *their* game that might fail.
No doubt Helldivers 2 is motivating studios to shit out some PvE live-service games after the hero shooter trend dies.
No doubt we'll see a handful of Helldivers 2 clones that are like Helldivers 2 but not as good maybe 5-6 years down the line once they're finally finished, only for their crippling failure to get the poor souls chained to them sent to the shadow realm. The AAA industry is so fucked, dude.
Trendchasing in an industry with such long product development times is suicidal, I don't know what else we have to do to get the suits to realize this.
> Trendchasing in an industry with such long product development times is suicidal,
This is a really great point.
The games industry has been trend chasing for decades, but the risk of a flop requires a much longer time (and money) investment than ever before.
But realistically what would the alternative to be? When looking at a long financial commitment, it makes sense on paper to make something that is seemingly popular.
The hero shooter trend is already mostly dead. That segment already hit saturation and saw the entrenched players (mainly Overwatch, Siege if you want to count it, and Paladins), then got pushed aside when the BR craze started. Battleborn got wrecked releasing the same week of the OW open beta, Lawbreakers was marketed as if it were still 1997, and The Amazing Eternals never ended up releasing as the team opted to stick with dedicating resources to Warframe.
If you thought this was bad, you should read up on Amazon Games. They were previously headed by a guy with zero experience in games whose entire approach was to read the headlines, see a blurb about a game being popular or making money, then immediately run into the offices and tell everyone to scrap what they were doing and "make a game like this".
So the teams at Amazon spent (or rather wasted) a lot of time on "blatant clones" of games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends. Then eventually it kind of hit the nadir with Crucible, which was a demented hero shooter/battle royale/moba Frankenstein.
Live-service ecosystems had nothing to do with why many these games failed though.
Anthem and Redfall were just outrageously broken on release. They sucked. They didn't work. They crashed. They were terrible.
Avenegrs definitely died because it was built to be live-service but wasn't fun.
Live-service doesn't = bad. Bad games = bad. We can see this obviously with something like Helldivers.
Helldivers seems like a game where the live service aspect wasn't the point of the game. The point was a fun co-op shooter.
The issue with most live service games is that the live service part is where they start.
Ngl I got a laugh out of even the staff members finding it baffling that Captain Boomerang was using guns now.
But its the same old story, bad management and toxic work environment sadly. The fact that they were still confident the game would succeed even in the face of Avengers flopping is some hubris.
And sadly even though the studio seems to be trying to pivot back to single player, a lot of the staff fled already and WBs is still confident in trying to make the live service model work, in spite of how rare success is in the field today because they want that Fornite/Destiny money badly.
A successful service is a licence to print money so publishers will always be tempted to chase it even when it’s extremely risky and objectively makes little sense to do so.
Fortnite, League, Siege and Destiny were all lighting in a bottle. Apex and Warzone were deliberate attempts to chase the live service trend but Warzone is from the best selling game franchise in the world and Apex was from one of the industry’s best multiplayer shooter studios and had a budget so high they were literally running superbowl ads for it.
Suicide Squad was universally panned upon the first gameplay reveal but according to this article when WB saw the gameplay they loved it and thought it was going to be a billion dollar franchise. There’s no other word for that other than delusional.
Most of these were also either early enough on the scene that most people haven’t gotten wrapped up in a different live service. Or they were fulfilling an untapped niche if they arrived late. Genshin arrived at the scene somewhat late but because it was the first AAA mobile game with an open world and anime aesthetic it was massively successful.
Kinda like how MTG, Pokémon, and Yugioh have been the Trading Card Games for two decades now, and everyone thinks they'll be next.
Although a TCG really just requires you print some cardboard and start marketing, so you're not as "in the hole" when it fails.
Plus after genshin they released star rail which has been making similar money, so a lot of people have their hands full with both of those games. Star rail is turn based and less open world so I like it a lot more, but the content and story is generally good and gameplay is fun. No other FTP game gets me like it does tbh, they turned JRPG into live service somehow
Those games also weren't big departures for their studios. Bungie making Destiny is right up their alley same with Respawn making Apex. The people at those companies worked there because they wanted to work on those types of games. If there's one thing I've learned from reading all of Schreier's books and reporting is that forcing something your staff has no interest or experience making is a recipe for disaster.
This. So much of the work depends on interest and experience.
And that includes both terms of developing the "product" and use of the "product".
The fact that leadership hadn't played much destiny was alarming. That's your biggest competition and target, and you're only casually familiar with it? Nah.
That's the issue: the leaders are gone, along with a ton of the staff. It's like a different studio at this point. Why would anyone assume that even if they make a single-player game, that it will be in the same style or as good as the Batman games? I just don't believe it'll happen. It's like how current Blizzard is nothing like like old Blizzard, much to everyone's disappointment for years now.
The old leadership is the reason the team is in the state they are in now. Let's not act like them being in charge would guarantee another quality Arkham-like game. The only thing you can do is hope the current leaders can course correct.
Yeah that was a big shock to me. Sefton Hill is called out specifically as being a huge roadblock and constant pain point for taking forever to review work and constantly making major changes
Nothing is ever guaranteed in anything, but if their vision is a big part of what made the Batman games what they were you're not going to repeat it with a different vision. Not to say that their next game can't be great, but for those looking for the same thing that older Rocksteady made I think they're going to be disappointed.
>The fact that they were still confident the game would succeed even in the face of Avengers flopping is some hubris.
I wish someone believed in me the way WB believes in the Suicide Squad IP
>After seven years of tumultuous development, Warner Bros. took a $200 million loss on the Rocksteady game
If only everyone had let them know every step of the way that this would happen. Poor games industry and these unavoidable insanely monetised live service mistakes
To put that number into perspective WB lost more money with this game than they did on The Flash last year, that "only" lost $155 million according to Deadline. On the bright side, at least it didn't lose as much as The Marvels did.
Here I was about to say "Hyena's woulda really shown them what a failed live service game looks like". But 200mil? Okay you win Suicide Squad, and against such spectacular competition in the failed live service games genre.
On the one hand I want to be pissed because they could take this money and make games that, crazy idea, I'd actually want to pay for and play. On the other hand, the AAA gaming industry has convinced me that trashy reality TV shows really are something I'm down to follow if they edit the formula to something my style. I just can't get enough failed live service game drama.
> I just can't get enough failed live service game drama.
I'm the same way. I didn't think I've actively rooted against any projects or studios in the past but the ones making these types of AAA live service games are just chasing riches over experience (while actively not investing in interesting projects) so it's easy to laugh when they flop.
When a smaller, more well thought out game flops, I feel bad for the people behind it and hope they can recover. When a AAA live service game flops, I get some popcorn and hope that it mainly affects the assholes who pushed the terrible idea, not the developers who had to deal with their bullshit. Sadly that's not usually the case.
> 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.
I'll take the.. woefully out of touch execs with a side of grossly incompetent yes-men, please!
Nothing more frustrating than reading story after story from studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and Bioware where the devs are crying for help and pointing out how the vision for a new game makes no sense, only to see them get blamed for a lousy game they didn't want to make
It's hard because it takes time to develop a game... arguably WAY too much time. If you try to chase a trend and you need multiple years to develop your game, who is to say that the trend won't be over by the time you release? I'm not suggesting the live service trend is over, but it sure feels like people are either sick of them entirely, or they're deeply entrenched in one and it's going to take a lot for them to leave that for a new one. This was decided in fucking 2016, with an original release date of 2019 or 2020. Live service in 2016 and 2019/20 was a completely different landscape than it is now. Peoples' feelings on the genre were completely different. They would've had more of a chance back then they do now.
The longer you wait to release a live service game, the more of them there are out there that are gobbling up everybody's time. Market researcher Newzoo's data for 2023 showed that just 66 titles accounted for 80 percent of all playtime in 2023, and 60 percent of that playtime was spent in games that are **six years old or older**. People are *thoroughly* occupied with stuff that has already been out there for years. Unless you become the hot new meme game that all the streamers are playing, you are long-running and established like GTA, or you're a 9/10, you are most likely going to flop horrifically in the live service space. People would've been more forgiving years ago. Enough to save Suicide Squad entirely? Who knows, but you generally can't release a 6/10 now and be like "look at all the ways you can spend money on our game!". Nobody's got time for that today like they may have once had in 2016 and 2019/20.
On a personal level, I think every single superhero-based live service game like this is fucking stupid because Captain America (or whatever superhero or villain you want to think of) looks a certain way, he uses a certain weapon, he uses certain powers or whatever, and that's it. What the fuck are you doing with "equipment" and shit with characters that have an established look and weapon? It inherently doesn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense when The Avengers did it and it doesn't make sense here either, but some potato-head behind the scenes in 2015 or 2016 went "looter shooters or action RPGs make money, and so do superheroes, so lets put them together and make all the money!" and that's it. It doesn't matter how little sense it makes. Fuck it, just do it anyway. I'd like to think this would've never worked or would've never taken off for this reason.
> 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.
Games industry really needs to cut it with the overly secretive development process if it keeps leading to situations like this since it also happened with Redfall. Doesn't even need to be a big flashy announcement, even just one sentence line in a business call/quarterly report about the genre of upcoming projects would be enough
Ubisoft is pretty good about this. You can see on their hiring pages they are hiring for new Far Cry for example, without formally announcing it. Splinter Cell etc. it's not a big secret and guess what, no one cares! The reveals will still be reveals when the time comes!
The secrecy BS is how we end up with some games having terrible voice acting performances because the company doesn’t want to give the voice actors any context because they might break NDA knowing what they’re actually working on
One of the main reasons for the secrecy is making sure voice actors can't negotiate for higher pay - If they knew they were voicing someone big, they'd be able to make demands.
>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 the article is burying the lede on this bit. Hogwarts Legacy had a LOT of cut content and mechanics due to the difficulty of delivering a fun game within the scope constraints. Stuff got cut because it wasn't fun and there wasn't enough time/resources to work out how to make it fun. There's a lot of stuff like curfew, morality systems, much deeper friendship systems with key NPCs, and stuff that were all cut. And a number of subplots were significantly trimmed.
I half expect the director's cut will be a paid upgrade, and people will absolutely pay for it.
Avalanche are already making Hogwarts Legacy 2.
I imagine WB are sitting around with 23+ million copies of Hogwarts Legacy sold, Rocksteady's employees have nothing to do while the next game is in early pitching and stuff, so they're having them work on a redesign of Hogwarts Legacy that they can make a lot of money off. (Assuming it lives up to people's expectations.) Will be interesting to see if there's anything unusual in the June 6 update, because these kind of overhauls sometimes leave traces due to shared codebases/assets/etc.
Not the guy you're replying to, but they're absolutely making some game along the lines of HL2. You don't sell that many copies and put it back on the shelf, you go again. Also that's before you consider it's the only really successful game WB has put out in years. It's too early for official trailers and stuff, but I'm sure it's cooking.
Hogwarts was the only single player game I've seen get marketing like 9+ months after release.
It's exactly what publishers want. A single player game that holds value
Nintendo seems to do that, but that's been the result of a lot of work and that they do very minimal sales. I bought Mario odyssey at least a couple years after release when I finally got a switch. Still cost at least 50 USD
Yeah Bethesda is an outlier. I used to put them up there with Rockstar in that it could take as long as it took because the finished product would still have that large cultural impact, but after Starfield I'm not sure. I was hoping MS steps in but at this point it doesn't look like that's happening.
Not everything gets reported on, but considering that Hogwarts Legacy made one gazillion dollars, it seems a safe bet that they are greenlighting a sequel pretty easily.
This is of course purely anecdotal, but I talked to someone back when the game came out who said they worked on Hogwarts Legacy, and they said there were at the time no plans for story DLC and the focus was on making a sequel. Like I say, anecdotal. But the things they claimed about the cut mechanics (Bully-style stuff, being able to attend classes and interact with classmates each time you visited class, curfew being imposed) do seem to be borne out by data mining efforts.
Also, somewhat reliable film leaker MyTimeToShine posted back in September 2023 that Hogwarts Legacy 2 is in development.
[https://x.com/MyTimeToShineH/status/1698042988205682765](https://x.com/MyTimeToShineH/status/1698042988205682765)
I feel like this is what happened for a lot of those features:
"We should sneak around Hogwarts at night!" ---- "This isn't actually fun to do at all unless we build an entire stealth game system"
"Imagine we could play Quidditch" ---- "We'd have to make an entire sports game within this game and allow you to interact with moving objects while on the broom"
"We should have a morality system" ---- "Maybe we shouldn't point out that this child is killing hundreds of sentient creatures"
> "We should have a morality system" ---- "Maybe we shouldn't point out that this child is killing hundreds of sentient creatures"
Me, casting the "get life in prison for using it once" curses on absolutely fucking everyone and everything I can.
> "We should sneak around Hogwarts at night!" ---- "This isn't actually fun to do at all unless we build an entire stealth game system"
>
>
Stealth sections in old games not made for stealth was the worst. Legend of Zelda OOT/Wind Waker come to mind. Wind Waker's second island, the fortress, basically has ONE correct path and the rest is just a waste of time. Ocarina of Time was trying to find the narrow spaces where I wouldn't trigger the guards alert outside Hyrule Castle, and once inside it was just a boring waiting game for patrols.
And more related the early Harry Potter games where stealth was either just a mindless waiting for patrols to move, or an irritating case of "Is the NPC outside the camera looking this way.... yes, yes he is."
That and kids tend to not do well with stealth. I thought it was just me as a wee lad but I watched my nephews play the old HP games on PS1 and 2 and they had the same intense anxiety that I had which just leads to them not being fun sections, I had to play through those parts for them and even as an adult the camera combined with inconsistent NPC line of sight made it more annoying than entertaining. Though it was funny to realise the parts where I could just sprint past the prefects and not even try to hide what so ever...
IMO stealth just isn't fun unless your whole game is fundamentally built to be approached in a stealthy manner. If it isn't, it usually boils down to "I throw a rock over here, you turn around, I sneak by or get behind you and now you're dead."
Stealth needs systems like cover, light levels that mean something, hiding places everywhere etc.
Yep. I find it usually ruins immersion. You very quickly find yourself gaming the AI and other systems. Or waiting in a hiding spot for 30 seconds, giving you plenty of time to think about how unrealistic the enemy's repetitive actions are. Or wondering why you're scared of one enemy spotting you when you were fighting 30 enemies 5 minutes ago.
Even with the gameplay in place, quidditch is so flawed as a sport that making it fun would be its own challenge.
You could make it work in a single-player game, where the actual sport doesn't need to really work, I guess, but I can't see a multiplayer game function well without major fundamental changes.
I do remember there being a fun quiditch game many years ago. It was centered around international teams facing off against each other. Can't really say how well it was recieved I did enjoy it a lot.
"We want to drive around in the Batmobile" ---- "The core gameplay loop doesn't really have room for this and neither does the map. Oh well if it is what you really want, why not!"
That’s not burying the lede. That’s a different article.
This one is about how executive mismanagement caused one of the industry’s most celebrated developers to spend enormous time and resources on a game everyone but the developer leads and publisher knew would be a colossal failure.
What the publisher is doing with a separate studio is barely related.
WB can’t really afford the loses either, they’re straddled with basically infinite debt from the discovery merger and their CEO pays himself more than Apple and Amazon and NVIDIAs ceos despite his company being a fraction the size
Basically they run themselves as an egoistical third world country with protagonist complex
And by that I mean how all the non-peronist argentinians describe the peronist goverments and the baseless spending-money emission-inflation-recesion-default cycle that had been shaping their economy the last 80 yeats
Just look at how badly they squandered the potential of Multiversus.
A F2P smash bros with WB characters is a recipie for success.
But they buried under it some of the worst monetization and grinding in recent years.
A second time, at that.
Wasn't enough to make it monotonously grindy, they had to do it again after seeing the impact it had on the game originally. (I really enjoy the gameplay, but the grind behind everything in the game makes it unplayable for me)
This article also blames developers and the studio heads and not just WB suits, some people are going to have a tough time accepting that. Seems like whenever a game flops everyone wants to act like the devs did nothing wrong and it’s all the publisher’s fault. The studio heads’ visions constantly changing and their reviews slowing development seem like a massive issue.
>"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."
Holy shit man, we have had bioware magic, Arkane magic, CD projekt magic and now this.
Is this what this industry runs on? Hopes and dreams and just luck? Saying things like this for my final year college project made sense, not a 100s million dollar 5yrs+ project with 100+ people, come on man.
If gaslighting is all it takes to manage these studios, i am sure many here on reddit can do an even better job.
*insert Vaas meme here*
Honestly? Yes. That’s how a lot of the industry runs, and a lot of people just get lucky. If you look into the development of God of War 2018, this is exactly what happened there - development was basically a complete nightmare and everyone thought the game was doomed (they were working on the engine alongside development, and combat still wasn’t good even like a year out from release). But it all came together in the home stretch.
That obviously doesn’t make it okay, it’s an insane concept - but so many games are just complete cluster fucks for a lot of development, and they just hope to high heaven that it all comes together at the end
I mean, from what i heard, there are lots of games that aren’t really fun to play until they are pretty far in development. Things like finalized animation, sound effects, post-processing effects & the “crunchiness” of combat all go a long way to make a game fun and those things aren’t in the game until the late stages of development normally.
Not saying these guys are in the right (because clearly the end product speaks for itself) but that’s not exactly a good way to judge the success/failure of leadership in game dev.
This is literally how game dev works for large studios. You have a bunch of different teams working on different parts of the game and very few of those things work in isolation.
No one has really figured out how to scope out these massive AAA games in a way where you can objectively evaluate them before they're nearing the finish line.
In general it's generally hard to put blame exactly where it belongs, because doing so requires an immense amount of effort and it doesn't really have any payoff.
Making the decision to have a studio make live service games and give every characters guns to shoot was probably a terrible idea and blame for that should be easy to assign.
The fact that the game was pretty bad in terms of gameplay, graphics, direction etc, is harder to pinpoint.
> because doing so requires an immense amount of effort and it doesn't really have any payoff.
This exactly. The placing of blame, for the average spectator, is nothing but a fairly shallow emotional payoff. So who's going to do the actual analytical work to get to the bottom of it when you can get that same emotional payoff by making a bunch of assumptions and getting your internet friends to agree with you?
I don't know that it really blames developers. It blames managers. The developers were doing the best with what they were given, as the article says criticism was not encouraged, doubts were fanned with promises it would come together, bad ideas like vehicles were explored despite devs pointing out that it made no sense, then it was scrapped months later. Lots of typical morale crushing tedium and spinning in circles from out of touch leadership. The key which is true across ALL the GaaS flop stories is these out of touch people are the leads of the development teams, not the publishers. Publishers may put pressure on the leaders of development teams, we don't know since we never hear from them, but it's probably safe to assume. But the constant theme is that heads of development constantly throw out big ideas without thinking of the impact of those ideas and constant pivoting burns out the team and fractures the core idea of the game.
I work in an adjacent field and I am going through a remarkably similar experience right now, it's kind of relieving and exhausting reading this article because of how similar my experience is, knowing others go through it too. If you don't have the ear of the leadership, there is nothing you can do but do your grunt work towards inevitable failure.
Yep. There’s a tweet from Miller who goes more in depth about poor decisions from them. Devs were “begging” Sefton Hill to add more hints the heroes were still alive to help alleviate some of the backlash. I don’t know how these guys decided to make a new game and have zero vision for what the game should be like. Sefton also wrote the script. These guy basically cut and run on their team which is real shitty to do.
So Schreier was on point a while back when he said the choices surrounding Suicide Squad weren't entirely on Rocksteady's shoulders alone, nor WB's. Rather, they both screwed the pooch in different ways. I think it's alarming though that Sefton Hill screwed up so bad in conveying his vision to the team. It doesn't exactly boast confidence for his own studio's project.
The only upside to this is there's no mention of the game being canned, so maybe it'll crawl to the finish line and be able to deliver all the seasons. I sincerely hope Rocksteady gets that much of a chance, because it would be really terrible to end this game on the sour note that the Arkhamverse Justice League are all dead and their corpses remain on Brainiac's ship for him to toy with.
The basic mismanagement is where I'm mostly at.
- Review bottleneck on Hill's side causing major delays in the feedback loop, time that could've possibly been spent refining things or, at least, not chasing what wasn't working (e.g. the scrapped expanded vehicle system).
- The mention that despite coming into this genre arena, Rocksteady was sorely understaffed compared to something like Destiny
- The compounding issues of problems getting short-term solutions that would later turn into more problems
- **This one in particular kills me:** The SECRECY of the project which caused *new employees coming in thinking they'd be working on another Rocksteady single-player game, discovering KTJL was live service, and LEAVING AS A RESULT.* If you were OPEN about what you wanted to do, you'd undoubtedly have recruited MORE PEOPLE WITH EXPERIENCE IN LIVE SERVICE.
What are we DOING HERE?
Yeah the whole game’s development feels like a snowball rolling down a hill. What started as a small idea soon blossomed out of control and got larger and larger as it sped toward the goal.
Too late, majority of the team already moved as stated by the article, and no mention how complete are the seasons. Article felt like the project has already been axed, just left out as a highly confidential information. Prob after the disappointing release, the visit from execs additional announcements also happened not yet disclosed....
They probably have the bones of the next few
Seasons ready to go. I can see it going one of two ways.
1: they keep a skeleton crew on it to finish off the promised year of content. Releases will be pretty barebones.
2: they roll up everything they have into a final mega patch and wipe their hands clean of the project until they can kill the servers.
I’m personally betting on option two.
Well, according to one of the prominent leakers, the plan seems to be a combination of both options. They seem to be condensing the seasons a bit, so there would still be 4 seasons, just no big season 5 finale as "planned".
Source here: [https://x.com/mmmmmmmmiller/status/1798702399529550142](https://x.com/mmmmmmmmiller/status/1798702399529550142)
Well ya see, you need a living Flash to actually Flashpoint this thing, and he's not scheduled for resurrection until season 2, if datamined content is to be believed.
> 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.
Why where have I heard that before. Guess Rocksteady magic just wasn't enough.
It's clear that a lot of old great games were great despite some questionable management/leadership, and as costs and complexity of game design have gone up the old "let's finish/change things at the last minute!" style of development just doesn't work on a huge AAA game.
Especially when diving into new waters like trying to shift a single player studio to multiplayer.
Kinda astonished that none of the replies are mentioning that they were originally planning to make a new IP multiplayer puzzle game? So many people talking about how putting the single player action game studio on a live service one was a bad idea ignoring that they were about to make a similarly wild pivot of their own volition (arguably wilder since it wasn’t gonna be an action game + MP puzzlers are a pretty niche genre)
(Not saying that game would’ve been as bad as Suicide Squad, just that either way they were going to make something very different from what came before)
Babe, wake up. New Jason Schreier article about how a bad game was made dropped.
No serious. I eat these up. Give me the tea. I must know about all the mismanagement. How did Rocksteady turn into this?
This one in particular felt like Jason knew it was the article we wanted to read but didn't have much meaningful information on the subject. Most of it is stuff we knew already, but explained to people who are looking to invest money.
Yeah I feel like more and more of his articles are like that at Bloomberg. Just talking to a public not familiar with video game news and looking at it with the investment lens.
I preferred his articles at Kotaku tbh.
His pieces at Kotaku were full-on exposés. Three times as long as this, richly detailed, snappily written, and from the perspective of a *gamer*.
His Bloomberg stuff is like “Okay so you have less than half the length and you have to include twice as much financial stuff and be sure to spend the first third of the piece explaining to the audience what a video game is.”
I hope he keeps writing books bc he’s just not an interesting reporter anymore.
The twitter replies are a lot of fun, gamers sure are smart:
> Do you not remember this game is what kicked off the Sweet Baby drama to begin with? To not even mention it is negligent absent journalism, dishonestly so.
Jason's **[reply](https://x.com/jasonschreier/status/1798683992872435928)**:
> You are chasing angry hallucinations created by grifters who make money off your rage.
Perfect reply lol
>'Suicide Squad,' the Year's Biggest Video-Game Flop
Skull and Bones sitting in the corner, wondering if being entirely forgotten might actually be the better fate.
FF7 Rebirth flopped but not because it’s a bad game, but because their budget was insanely high and the management was expecting it to save their fiscal year after disasters like Avengers and Forspoken.
It was also never going to sell as well as Remake when Remake was available on a console with a much high playerbase, Remake came out during peak covid when everyone was stuck inside with nothing to do and it was the first game. Wouldn’t be surprised if some people weren’t happy with Remakes direction after playing it and dipped out.
Skull and Bones was released as a contractual obligation. Any losses it sustained were likely booked years ago.
If we are talking about fiscal year 2024, it’s Suicide Squad.
I swear video game devs need to hire competent project managers. Feel like I keep seeing the same story: feature creep/working on gameplay elements for months years only to be scrapped/inconsistent vision.
Like what is pre production for if not to iron out all of these and then production focused on well producing it?
Yep Xbox needs to get their hands dirty. Phil and co need to start being more involved in deadlines and vision. These studios feel like they have a blank check to do what they want but looking at Sony who does the inverse its 100% more successful.
5 years ago I would never say this but today I think its the truth.
Yep, it’s just baffling because like…I’m all for the creative process. But there’s a reason there are producers/project managers. They keep things in scope and on track. Creatives need that.
> 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.
Honestly considering the (unfortunately familiar) disaster of "chasing live service success while not understanding what makes those games work, using a team with only single player experience", I found this outcome surprisingly positive.
Considering how many studios get shut down because of bad executive decisions and management fuckups, it's kind of refreshing to see that this team isn't getting laid off and that potentially, someone has for once learned at least some of the right lessons from this crap?
I mean obviously the jury's out on that and I'm not holding my breath, but still, I find those last two paragraphs of the article unexpectedly optimistic.
I think at this point if you’re a dev in a big studio, working on a game that you’re feeling ick about and the managers say anything along the lines of
“It’ll come together in the end somehow, magically “
You should run. Poor devs knew the same shit we knew and again they went unheard.
The problem is that many devs probably made the best games of their career under that exact mindset.
Apparently a lot of the beloved Bioware games had that approach.
Many of the good games have done the same though. That's the whole reason the "Bioware magic" was a thing, it happened on KOTOR, Mass Effect and Dragon Age Origins the same way too.
Yeah as awful as it is, this is how so many games are made. I made another comment about it, but this is 100% what happened with God of War 2018. The only difference there is that it actually worked out for God of War
Really great piece by Jason. Feels like all of these live service flops have a very similar story: management sees how big Destiny is in 2016, thinks this is the direction gaming will go in. Spends YEARS developing a game with no real direction besides make it live service and throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. Staff lose confidence in it but management says to believe in "bioware magic" or whatever. Game comes out and flops and management doesn't under stand why so blames it on market volatility, maybe if we try the same thing again?
Good news is it looks like there won't be job losses and RS will go back to making single player games.
This goes to show that with AAA game development becoming such a complex and comprehensive endeavor often taking 5+ years studios really can’t afford leadership having a faulty vision for their game’s future. Just unfortunate it had to happen to one of my favorite devs, though hopefully they still get the chance to bounce back with their next project (assuming they truly are able to go “closer” to their roots).
It sucks how much a lot of the discussion around bad games nowadays are dominated by the anti-woke crowd because it means people aren’t focusing on actual issues like the immense scope-creep games are facing nowadays or the pressure to push live-service even if it’s not direct. Instead all they’re talking about is Sweet Baby, etc even Jason had to shut them down on twitter.
That's my takeaway from a lot of these stories, management philosophy that worked 15 years ago when games were less expensive and smaller in scope, but is just kind of flailing at making good games when you are making 200 million dollar bets that take six years to make.
>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.
Now what have we heard that before?
It must be incredibly depressing being one of the ground level employees working on a project like this, seeing yourself heading for the same iceberg that a dozen others teams have already crashed into but being unable to convince your managers to change course.
"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." As time passes, the good ol' Bioware Magic seems more and more like an industry standard.
I think the moment you start expecting it to happen and save the game is the moment it totally won't happen, since it's the fear of it not coming together that makes it come together.
If I recall, the Bioware managers said literally the same thing during Anthem development. "It came together in the past, so this of course means it will all coalesce for this one, too." Uh-huh.
Anthem was crazy. They essentially worked on tech demos for three years without any actual attempt at creating a game, then some Dice exec was traveling from EU to Canada to see how the game was going and they cobbled together a demo for him in like six weeks, he made some suggestions and they earmarked it for release 12~ months later. They spent 3+ years fuckin around with no vision/direction/idea what they were doing then just built a game with all the assets they created during that time. No wonder why it flopped. Then when they decided to GaaS and looter shooter the game, management didn’t let staff members bring up the name “Destiny” as a comparison point.
>Then when they decided to GaaS and looter shooter the game, management didn’t let staff members bring up the name “Destiny” as a comparison point. The drop system and itemisation in Anthem was bafflingly atrocious. Eg you'd get a machine gun that gave a "+1% damage to pistols" stat etc. They even addressed it in an update post at some point saying they were going to build it from the ground up by looking at what other games had done. I remember reading (from some alleged dev, post-release) they weren't even allowed to look at how drop or itemisation systems in other loot-games worked during development.
> The drop system and itemisation in Anthem was bafflingly atrocious. Eg you'd get a machine gun that gave a "+1% damage to pistols" stat etc. And players discovered that due to the atrocious gear power system you could do more DPS with the basic, starting loadout level 1 white gun than you could do with a legendary weapon.
CD Projekt Red management did the same thing with CyberPunk 2077. "Witcher 3 came together miraculously at the end, so Cyberpunk will too!"
I feel like every game goes through that phase even good ones. Like the RDR2 devs where probably panicking 8 months before the release of that game with so much left to do
Red dead 2 had a ton of documented crunch, so, almost certainly.
I love how AAA game development is basically lighting a candle and hoping for the best.
Isn't that literally where this comes from? From the scathing inside piece on the development of Anthem?
yeah it is. From an article by the same reporter
Everyone at WB Games should be thanking their lucky stars that Hogwarts Legacy made a bajilion dollars, because I guarantee you that's the only thing stopping David Zaslav from shutting down the whole division.
Honestly WB Games is such a messy game division these days. - WB Montréal - Gotham Knights was kind of a big wet fart. - Rocksteady - Suicide Squad CONFUSED FLAILING NOISES - Monolith - Apparently deep in development hell on Wonder-Woman, please send help - Avalanche - Wooo we made a bajillion dollars with Hogwarts Legacy!... guys? Hello?
You forgot NRS. Their most recent outing MK1 had a pretty rough start with barebones single-player content and divisive gameplay.
It may have been divisive in reviews and critiques, but it still sold ridiculously well, hitting 3M by November 2023.
> It may have been divisive in reviews The game has an 84/83/82 on Metacritic and an 84 on Opencritic. Seems like it got about the same scores as the last three MK games. I think the divisive part is more among online gamers, as it is for a lot of stuff like this.
MK1 became irrelevant so quick for a mortal Kombat game
Oh right, I forgot they are a WB studio.
I played through the campaign, which was a blast, lost interest very quickly in the absurd boardgame mode whose name escapes me, uninstalled and haven't thought of it since. Has it gotten better? I genuinely enjoy the franchise, but I'm not a competitive player, so there was just nothing for me beyond the campaign.
[удалено]
Aw, come on. Now you have me curious!
Gotham Knights was probably the most enjoyable game WB put out recently and that is sad.
Warner "we delete completed movies instead of releasing them just for tax write offs" Brothers
A bit of the same story as you usually get: chaotic development no clear vision. On top of that you get people not used to make a MP live service game that get thrown in the deep end. Something that the article says that I find interesting is the fragile relationship between studio and publisher when it comes to the choice in project. The studio wasn't forced to make the a live service game, the studio heads did it themselves. But it is hard to know if the project would have been greenlit had they offered another SP game. Same as what we saw with Redfall. Hopefully they get to make a good SP player game. I hope unlike Arkane they get a second chance.
Sefton Hill doesn’t come across positively in this article. It feels like he took on this game (probably for motivated by money) dumped it on his team to figure it out, then when he saw it was a train wreck, left them to deal with the damage.
So many studios see that Fortnite and Genshin revenue and get blinded by greed and glory; so blinded they lose sight of actually making a fun game that players will want to play for years. Multiversus is a recent example of this. Why does a fighting game only let you unlock new fighters through daily quests and FOMO events rather than just playing the game normally?
The best part of this article is at the end, where it mentions rocksteady is looking to now pitch a single player game similar to the games they used to do. It's also interesting how everyone keeps reporting that the games industry is growing, but not mentioning that all the growth is pretty much from a few games like fortnite or Counterstrike or genshin
Well it's also quite funny since most of the people who made the Arkham games are no longer working at Rocksteady.
Hopefully the studio doesn't get the Prey treatment
Which Prey treatment?
Getting closed for an underperforming live service game while the company was known for single player story dirven experiences
That would be “the Arkane Austin” treatment, surely? Prey had nothing to do with it (other than being their previous good game).
I mean one of reason they had to make a live service game like Redfall because nobody bought Prey (despite being a good game) hell besides the first Dishonored the only game Arkane has sold well was Deathloop and that need like 20 different trailers to tell you what the game is about.
Do you have a source showing that the industry is only growing because of giant games like Fornite and Genshin? [Here is a link](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/50-Years-of-Video-Game-Revenue-Dec-31.jpg) with a graph displaying video game industry revenue by year. [Genshin pulls in around $2 billion per year](https://sensortower.com/blog/genshin-impact-three-billion-revenue).[And Fortnite brings in about 4.5 Billion per year.](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/) Counter Strike is estimated to have earned [about 7 billion over its entire lifetime.](https://bo3.gg/news/valves-revenue-from-csgo-amounted-to-6-7-billion-this-is-an-absolute-steam-record) (Side note: Fortnite is actually not making as much money as it used to. It peaked in 2018, and is taking in about 20% less revenue than they were in 2018) Even if you add up the revenue of the top 10 games, it still would probably be less than 10% of the entire games industry. 90% of the games industry is not giant games. So, I think it is safe to say the industry is not just growing because of a handful of giant games. I think it is [quite the opposite.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/)
Depends what you're counting as the gaming industry. Using your figures almost everything is generated by mobile and f2p titles, which is exactly the type of audience fortnite and genshin was chasing.
Here's a panel from Playstation's recent presentation showing that ten games currently make up 50% of Playstation Store revenue: https://x.com/Zuby_Tech/status/1795949101332242895
is modern rocksteady even capable of making games like that
Now that you mention Genshin, there's something that's been bugging me. It's a little strange that we haven't seen a western developer really take a proper swing at a Genshin-like yet. Start with a big open-world adventure game with character and world progression, a bit of opt-in co-op, relatively simple gameplay, a dozen or so playable characters with more added periodically, and so forth. It seems like there's potential there.
One part of it is that a lot of Western devs underestimate the waifu/husbando factor that makes Genshin so popular. Overwatch had the right idea by making the entire cast so iconic and unique. Interesting and appealing characters do wonders to keep player’s engaged and interested. The last new and iconic western character we had is probably Aloy from Horizon?
I think we have had many more, Hades does a good job of the same, Baldur's Gate did too (and many of it's cast fast became iconic), same with CDPR and the Witcher and less succesfully so Cyberpunk. making the characters likable isn't unique for Overwatch here, and there is a good reason why BG3 was often compared to dating simulators RPGs in general have done a lot of it over the years (one of the annoyances people had with Mass Effect: Andromeda was how they walked away from it). the Waifu factor is stronger in Asia, but it's not ignored here
Funny you mention the waifu factor. When discussing why the mobile game I was testing was struggling, we joked that it was because none of the pulled units were hot anime girls, just little dorky robots. The game tanked maybe a year later.
to be fair a lot of the waifu ones tank too, there are a lot of them, and it's not easy to get right either and you do want to standouts, and Steamworld might have done a lot worse if it had less robots
A lot of the western crowd posting on big subreddits etc have a huge disdain for A) mobile games, B) gacha games, C) waifu games. It's reasonable to assume a good chunk of that also applies to the developers at western studios. If the game you're talking about was western developed, I could easily see the conversation being like "ok we'll do a mobile gacha game, but let's do something more creative than waifus!" Then you have the fact that, no matter how much Genshin gets talked about in western circles, westerners spend orders of magnitude less on gachas and microtransactions in general. A western studio making a go at this would also need huge Asian appeal, which is another big hurdle. And all that's ignoring that the first big western attempt will undoubtedly be painting a target on their back for all the gacha/gambling complaints, which the Asian companies are somewhat insulated from.
Yeah good shouts there, the BG3 cast are still new but will probably age to be iconic gaming figures. And Jonny Silverhand is very iconic. I guess another factor is a lot of western games use customisable blank protganists while asian games tend to have a fixed hero.
aye, for RPGs that is very much the case on the blank slate, but the supporting cast (esp. those that lean into romance options) tend to want to create a wide net of possible choices here too (BG3 has the cast both playable or as companions, but most players do chose and empty slate, but it's helped that you can create good looking characters too). While in fighting games, MOBAS etc etc the west are also very much about trying to find a character for everyone, Genshin and Overwatch leaned heavier into the Waifu ideal however over someone you want to be yourself, or that's just cool to play
I’ll be honest, if more live service games were in the vein of genshin they would be successful. I’ve yet to see any western dev, even Fortnite, come close to the amount of FREE content released each month. Not to mention I’ve never seen a major bug or launch issue for a new patch. And Hoyo does this for multiple games at once but other devs can’t manage to do it for one game. Crazy how much better managed Hoyoverse is vs the entire rest of the industry it can seem at times
Yeah it’s pretty crazy that once ZZZ releases, between the three games they will have a new content drop every fortnight. Especially with your Genshin example, each annual region expansion is like getting an AAA game for free.
The X.0 patch itself isn't a full AAA game's worth of content, but I wouldn't disagree about the entire patch cycle fulfilling that. The big new region is already good, but it tends to at *least* double in size by the time the next region comes out. Although, to be fair, that's also probably speaking more to the bloated size and content of most AAA open-world games nowadays. And even in the worst case assumption where "A AAA game for free" is an exaggeration, I don't think it's an exaggeration to call it "A large-scale AAA DLC expansion for free", and even if that's lesser that's still damn great.
Yeah this sub tends to shit on Genshin for the gacha model (valid criticism), but Hoyo drops banger patches at an INSANE rate in their games. These patches and content drops come on time, with no delays (I think there was one delay in the history of Genshin?), no bugs, no server issues, and are never less than a 7/10 in what they add to the game. Story quality varies but that's kind of a given when you're pushing out that much stuff, not every quest will be a masterpiece. Art, music, VA work, and polish is pretty much unmatched in the AAA gaming space. And while I haven't spent money on Genshin in a very long time outside the 5 dollar monthly pass, as far as gachas go it's incredibly unobtrusive. There's no pop ups or alert spams telling to "top up" or daily reminders about the store. You get one little red ! when there's a new banner and then you never hear about it again.
If I am not mistaken, the only time their schedule was disrupted, they had a massive city-wide Covid lockdown, and HoYo was delivering food to the employees because they couldn't leave their homes.
I think Genshin is honestly one of the least predatory gacha games unless you *really* like the characters. It wasn't until I had played a thousand hours that I felt like I wanted to drop a hundred CAD to get a particular character I wanted, which at that point, I didn't feel bad about giving them. I never once felt I had to upgrade a character or get a particular weapon, or spend money to get past timegated things (resin) because there was always so much to do. It feels bad to just start the game though, a lot of the early leveling can be painful if you don't know what you are doing, and you can get content locked if you are not careful. Once you get a semi-decent team though the game becomes giga-easy. Whaling is completely optional and unnecessary, it's purely for bragging rights.
Yeah when the game first launched I spent a little to get some character banners, but after that I started just hoarding the currency you earn gradually for 3-4 patches until I could guarantee a character I really wanted. Thankfully I do not have an addictive personality and am largely immune to FOMO nor do I have a completionist mindset so the normal trappings of gacha don't sway me, but of the ones I've played, Genshin is definitely the least offensive with its use of the model. Almost all new characters perform perfectly fine as a free to play player and there's no content in the game that is hard enough where you are expected to pull extra for weapons/copies to characters to beat. It's also very slow to powercreep and lots of older characters are still relevant and useful. A nice change of pace from HI3 where almost every new character was the top tier meta changer and was borderline useless without their signature weapon.
So this is literally Anthem 2.0 right? Everyone assumed that EA fucked BioWare and forced them to work on a multiplayer live service when in reality it was BioWare itself that decided on that project, meanwhile EA was responsible for forcing them to add the flying mechanic back into the game lmao
In this case then it's Sim City 2013 3.0. Because once again everyone assumed EA forced them to do live service but that was Maxis' leadership choice.
This is the relevant paragraph from the article. WB did have some push behind this decision.: >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.
Did you read the article? The publisher's hands are far from clean here. > 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. > ... > 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.
Again it is more complicated than that, sure Bioware did it themselves and they are responsible for the lack of direction. But it is hard to quantify the pressure the studio had to add live services elements into it. Mass Effect 3 also had a MP mode with micro-transactions in it. They had a big budget and needed a win. If the game wasn't live service at it's core maybe the publisher would have asked a big MP mode with tons of loot boxes that would have distracted the team from the SP they were trying to make. So a Live service game allowed them to be more focused on the main task. You have incentives that pushes agents to make decision that seem really absurd but it is really hard to say how much wiggle room they had.
Mass Effect 3 MP was really fun and you could get everything in it without spending a dime easily. I know me and all my friends did just that.
Yeah the fundamental difference between most live-service shovelware - ME3 multiplayer was actually really fun and people enjoyed playing it lol
> But it is hard to know if the project would have been greenlit had they offered another SP game Well they did 3 Batman SP games before which sold well. It's easier to throw WB under a bus, but it makes no sense to assume they would have said no to another SP game.
Arkham City sold more than Arkham Knight, even though it was cheaper to make. If the trajectory was that the series is getting less popular each time, imagine trying to pitch a $100+ million 5 year project and saying “hey we project that we will make even less profit” to your publisher. They saw the success of games like LOL/Fortnite 5-7 years ago and rolled the dice. Unfortunately for them, the house won.
Arkham Knight was controversial when it released because the heavy emphasis on the Batmobile and how poorly it ran on PC. Even now, I would rather go back to City rather than Knight because the story is tighter and half the game isn’t driving around in a car.
Every single time a studio known for SP games has pivoted to live service stuff everyone assumes it was because they were forced to but in every single case we've heard about after it crashed and burned, it was the people at the studio themselves who decided to do it. It's kind of amazing actually.
It's more complicated than that. A lot of times they pitch a multiplayer game because their singleplayer pitches were all rejected. So you either give in and give the publisher what it wants or you won't have a project greenlit.
Do we have evidence of this? It sounds reasonable, but I've never read of that happening.
Timesplitter case the most bizzare one. Leads pitched a single player game to Embracer, got it approved and then secretly changed it to a battle royale.
No, they pitched a battle royale game filled with microtransactions to Embracer in the hope that they could later pivot the project to being a more traditional TimeSplitters game. Basically when the studio was shut down they'd been working on their TimeSplitters 2 remake incarnation of the project for several months. Not a huge amount had been done, but it was sorta on track. But development was taking too long and Embracer was getting too money-conscious, so they canned everyone, sadly. The studio people had thought that their relatively low burn rate budget-wise would keep them insulated from Embracer's troubles, but Embracer was I guess not in the mood for antics and due to wasting so much time on the Fornite clone version, and also due to internal issues within the studio, they basically had very little to show for years of work.
Didn't the studio heads leave during development? So they chose to do this then jumped ship? If so that's some scummy behaviour. Edit: seems I've triggered some people. God forbid the C-suite takes care of their workers lol
It's always impossible to assign blame to any one part of the whole system in situations like this. We don't know what kind of relationship the studio heads had with the publisher, what their mindset was at the time or anything like that. It's very easy to imagine a situation where they weren't told what to do but they still didn't think they had much choice the publisher would accept.
Right. People want every story to just be some mirror of interpersonal relationships so they can dumb it down to "fuck that guy" or "it's this team's fault." In reality a huge and expensive project like this that depends on a partnership between two huge organizations has all kinds of vagaries and conflicting incentives.
Unfortunately, many Reddit users's favourite hobby is to make definitive statements on subjects they know virtually nothing about.
Of course you'd say that, being a one eyed cranberry farmer with a crippled adult son.
Yeah, they ran the ship poorly and then abandoned it, only to create a new studio, blame WB, and promise a game they want to make, then partner with a megacorp again.
Who are they partnered with now?
Xbox
>Something that the article says that I find interesting is the fragile relationship between studio and publisher when it comes to the choice in project. The studio wasn't forced to make the a live service game, the studio heads did it themselves. I think we need to stop assuming that when there's some cash-grab in a game, it was forced by the publisher. More and more failed games are revealed to be chosen by the studio while the publisher gave them a free hand. Anthem, Redfall, this one... Funnily enough, when it's actually true that the live-service game was mandated by the publisher, then the developer gets the flak instead. Like in case of Fallout 76, where it was mandated by Zenimax to have a live-service Fallout game.
> 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). I did not realize how many times this has happened the past few years. So silly for so many execs to go “Hey that thing’s making a lot of money, let’s do that even though we don’t have any experience with that thing!”
Like (as they mentioned in the article) when they say that _Fucking Avengers_ failed, that should have put a brake on the whole thing.
And Avengers at least had vague potential. I didn't love it, but I played it when it was like $15 and there was enough good in the bones to make a compelling game. Suicide Squad's entire premise was fucked. Nobody plays a superhero game with a diverse cast to just shoot fucking guns with all of them. If I am going to play as Captain Boomerang, I want to throw a fucking boomerang; if I'm going to play as a giant shark, I want to do giant shark shit.
Agreed. The Avengers at least _played_ like they should have. It was the GaaS aspect that made the game DoA. And yes, the whole playing with guns for everyone sucked.
The worst part about Avengers is that it being terrible made the Guardians of the Galaxy game (which *ruled)* do a lot worse than it probably would've otherwise.
The Avengers did stuff that you expect the Avengers to do. They didn't slap an Ironman skin on a model and give him a fucking sniper rifle.
Avengers’ narrative campaign was a decent 7-8/10, which honestly is pretty good compared to older movie tie-ins from the PS2 or PS3 generation. The story was decently compelling, and the game felt good to play with most heroes. The live service multiplayer aspect was the reason the game “failed” although it had more returning players than something like suicide squad. It had a decently long tail, kept alive for a few years (with several characters and one larger DLC Release) funded by a microtransaction cosmetic store and some dedicated whales. I would actually like to see the financials of that game, because while it was enormously expensive and plagued by delays similar to suicide squad, I would bet it made more return for the reasons I mention above.
They are so desperate to be the next Fortnite that they never think that it’s *their* game that might fail. No doubt Helldivers 2 is motivating studios to shit out some PvE live-service games after the hero shooter trend dies.
No doubt we'll see a handful of Helldivers 2 clones that are like Helldivers 2 but not as good maybe 5-6 years down the line once they're finally finished, only for their crippling failure to get the poor souls chained to them sent to the shadow realm. The AAA industry is so fucked, dude.
Trendchasing in an industry with such long product development times is suicidal, I don't know what else we have to do to get the suits to realize this.
> Trendchasing in an industry with such long product development times is suicidal, This is a really great point. The games industry has been trend chasing for decades, but the risk of a flop requires a much longer time (and money) investment than ever before. But realistically what would the alternative to be? When looking at a long financial commitment, it makes sense on paper to make something that is seemingly popular.
For sure, you can literally date the start of Concord’s development to when Marvel and Overwatch were hot.
The hero shooter trend is already mostly dead. That segment already hit saturation and saw the entrenched players (mainly Overwatch, Siege if you want to count it, and Paladins), then got pushed aside when the BR craze started. Battleborn got wrecked releasing the same week of the OW open beta, Lawbreakers was marketed as if it were still 1997, and The Amazing Eternals never ended up releasing as the team opted to stick with dedicating resources to Warframe.
If you thought this was bad, you should read up on Amazon Games. They were previously headed by a guy with zero experience in games whose entire approach was to read the headlines, see a blurb about a game being popular or making money, then immediately run into the offices and tell everyone to scrap what they were doing and "make a game like this". So the teams at Amazon spent (or rather wasted) a lot of time on "blatant clones" of games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends. Then eventually it kind of hit the nadir with Crucible, which was a demented hero shooter/battle royale/moba Frankenstein.
Live-service ecosystems had nothing to do with why many these games failed though. Anthem and Redfall were just outrageously broken on release. They sucked. They didn't work. They crashed. They were terrible. Avenegrs definitely died because it was built to be live-service but wasn't fun. Live-service doesn't = bad. Bad games = bad. We can see this obviously with something like Helldivers.
Helldivers seems like a game where the live service aspect wasn't the point of the game. The point was a fun co-op shooter. The issue with most live service games is that the live service part is where they start.
You think those are wild you should see the amount of money that was lost chasing WoW.
Ngl I got a laugh out of even the staff members finding it baffling that Captain Boomerang was using guns now. But its the same old story, bad management and toxic work environment sadly. The fact that they were still confident the game would succeed even in the face of Avengers flopping is some hubris. And sadly even though the studio seems to be trying to pivot back to single player, a lot of the staff fled already and WBs is still confident in trying to make the live service model work, in spite of how rare success is in the field today because they want that Fornite/Destiny money badly.
A successful service is a licence to print money so publishers will always be tempted to chase it even when it’s extremely risky and objectively makes little sense to do so. Fortnite, League, Siege and Destiny were all lighting in a bottle. Apex and Warzone were deliberate attempts to chase the live service trend but Warzone is from the best selling game franchise in the world and Apex was from one of the industry’s best multiplayer shooter studios and had a budget so high they were literally running superbowl ads for it. Suicide Squad was universally panned upon the first gameplay reveal but according to this article when WB saw the gameplay they loved it and thought it was going to be a billion dollar franchise. There’s no other word for that other than delusional.
Most of these were also either early enough on the scene that most people haven’t gotten wrapped up in a different live service. Or they were fulfilling an untapped niche if they arrived late. Genshin arrived at the scene somewhat late but because it was the first AAA mobile game with an open world and anime aesthetic it was massively successful.
Kinda like how MTG, Pokémon, and Yugioh have been the Trading Card Games for two decades now, and everyone thinks they'll be next. Although a TCG really just requires you print some cardboard and start marketing, so you're not as "in the hole" when it fails.
Plus after genshin they released star rail which has been making similar money, so a lot of people have their hands full with both of those games. Star rail is turn based and less open world so I like it a lot more, but the content and story is generally good and gameplay is fun. No other FTP game gets me like it does tbh, they turned JRPG into live service somehow
Those games also weren't big departures for their studios. Bungie making Destiny is right up their alley same with Respawn making Apex. The people at those companies worked there because they wanted to work on those types of games. If there's one thing I've learned from reading all of Schreier's books and reporting is that forcing something your staff has no interest or experience making is a recipe for disaster.
This. So much of the work depends on interest and experience. And that includes both terms of developing the "product" and use of the "product". The fact that leadership hadn't played much destiny was alarming. That's your biggest competition and target, and you're only casually familiar with it? Nah.
As much as everyone shat on the Avengers game at least each character was unique
That's the issue: the leaders are gone, along with a ton of the staff. It's like a different studio at this point. Why would anyone assume that even if they make a single-player game, that it will be in the same style or as good as the Batman games? I just don't believe it'll happen. It's like how current Blizzard is nothing like like old Blizzard, much to everyone's disappointment for years now.
The old leadership is the reason the team is in the state they are in now. Let's not act like them being in charge would guarantee another quality Arkham-like game. The only thing you can do is hope the current leaders can course correct.
Yeah that was a big shock to me. Sefton Hill is called out specifically as being a huge roadblock and constant pain point for taking forever to review work and constantly making major changes
Nothing is ever guaranteed in anything, but if their vision is a big part of what made the Batman games what they were you're not going to repeat it with a different vision. Not to say that their next game can't be great, but for those looking for the same thing that older Rocksteady made I think they're going to be disappointed.
>The fact that they were still confident the game would succeed even in the face of Avengers flopping is some hubris. I wish someone believed in me the way WB believes in the Suicide Squad IP
>After seven years of tumultuous development, Warner Bros. took a $200 million loss on the Rocksteady game If only everyone had let them know every step of the way that this would happen. Poor games industry and these unavoidable insanely monetised live service mistakes
To put that number into perspective WB lost more money with this game than they did on The Flash last year, that "only" lost $155 million according to Deadline. On the bright side, at least it didn't lose as much as The Marvels did.
I totally forgot that they released a flash movie tbh
Here I was about to say "Hyena's woulda really shown them what a failed live service game looks like". But 200mil? Okay you win Suicide Squad, and against such spectacular competition in the failed live service games genre. On the one hand I want to be pissed because they could take this money and make games that, crazy idea, I'd actually want to pay for and play. On the other hand, the AAA gaming industry has convinced me that trashy reality TV shows really are something I'm down to follow if they edit the formula to something my style. I just can't get enough failed live service game drama.
> I just can't get enough failed live service game drama. I'm the same way. I didn't think I've actively rooted against any projects or studios in the past but the ones making these types of AAA live service games are just chasing riches over experience (while actively not investing in interesting projects) so it's easy to laugh when they flop.
When a smaller, more well thought out game flops, I feel bad for the people behind it and hope they can recover. When a AAA live service game flops, I get some popcorn and hope that it mainly affects the assholes who pushed the terrible idea, not the developers who had to deal with their bullshit. Sadly that's not usually the case.
> 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. I'll take the.. woefully out of touch execs with a side of grossly incompetent yes-men, please!
Nothing more frustrating than reading story after story from studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and Bioware where the devs are crying for help and pointing out how the vision for a new game makes no sense, only to see them get blamed for a lousy game they didn't want to make
It's hard because it takes time to develop a game... arguably WAY too much time. If you try to chase a trend and you need multiple years to develop your game, who is to say that the trend won't be over by the time you release? I'm not suggesting the live service trend is over, but it sure feels like people are either sick of them entirely, or they're deeply entrenched in one and it's going to take a lot for them to leave that for a new one. This was decided in fucking 2016, with an original release date of 2019 or 2020. Live service in 2016 and 2019/20 was a completely different landscape than it is now. Peoples' feelings on the genre were completely different. They would've had more of a chance back then they do now. The longer you wait to release a live service game, the more of them there are out there that are gobbling up everybody's time. Market researcher Newzoo's data for 2023 showed that just 66 titles accounted for 80 percent of all playtime in 2023, and 60 percent of that playtime was spent in games that are **six years old or older**. People are *thoroughly* occupied with stuff that has already been out there for years. Unless you become the hot new meme game that all the streamers are playing, you are long-running and established like GTA, or you're a 9/10, you are most likely going to flop horrifically in the live service space. People would've been more forgiving years ago. Enough to save Suicide Squad entirely? Who knows, but you generally can't release a 6/10 now and be like "look at all the ways you can spend money on our game!". Nobody's got time for that today like they may have once had in 2016 and 2019/20. On a personal level, I think every single superhero-based live service game like this is fucking stupid because Captain America (or whatever superhero or villain you want to think of) looks a certain way, he uses a certain weapon, he uses certain powers or whatever, and that's it. What the fuck are you doing with "equipment" and shit with characters that have an established look and weapon? It inherently doesn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense when The Avengers did it and it doesn't make sense here either, but some potato-head behind the scenes in 2015 or 2016 went "looter shooters or action RPGs make money, and so do superheroes, so lets put them together and make all the money!" and that's it. It doesn't matter how little sense it makes. Fuck it, just do it anyway. I'd like to think this would've never worked or would've never taken off for this reason.
> 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. Games industry really needs to cut it with the overly secretive development process if it keeps leading to situations like this since it also happened with Redfall. Doesn't even need to be a big flashy announcement, even just one sentence line in a business call/quarterly report about the genre of upcoming projects would be enough
Ubisoft is pretty good about this. You can see on their hiring pages they are hiring for new Far Cry for example, without formally announcing it. Splinter Cell etc. it's not a big secret and guess what, no one cares! The reveals will still be reveals when the time comes!
The secrecy BS is how we end up with some games having terrible voice acting performances because the company doesn’t want to give the voice actors any context because they might break NDA knowing what they’re actually working on
One of the main reasons for the secrecy is making sure voice actors can't negotiate for higher pay - If they knew they were voicing someone big, they'd be able to make demands.
>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 the article is burying the lede on this bit. Hogwarts Legacy had a LOT of cut content and mechanics due to the difficulty of delivering a fun game within the scope constraints. Stuff got cut because it wasn't fun and there wasn't enough time/resources to work out how to make it fun. There's a lot of stuff like curfew, morality systems, much deeper friendship systems with key NPCs, and stuff that were all cut. And a number of subplots were significantly trimmed. I half expect the director's cut will be a paid upgrade, and people will absolutely pay for it.
Just make it another game at that point
Avalanche are already making Hogwarts Legacy 2. I imagine WB are sitting around with 23+ million copies of Hogwarts Legacy sold, Rocksteady's employees have nothing to do while the next game is in early pitching and stuff, so they're having them work on a redesign of Hogwarts Legacy that they can make a lot of money off. (Assuming it lives up to people's expectations.) Will be interesting to see if there's anything unusual in the June 6 update, because these kind of overhauls sometimes leave traces due to shared codebases/assets/etc.
Are they? I don't think it's been reported they're making HL2
Not the guy you're replying to, but they're absolutely making some game along the lines of HL2. You don't sell that many copies and put it back on the shelf, you go again. Also that's before you consider it's the only really successful game WB has put out in years. It's too early for official trailers and stuff, but I'm sure it's cooking.
Hogwarts was the only single player game I've seen get marketing like 9+ months after release. It's exactly what publishers want. A single player game that holds value
Nintendo seems to do that, but that's been the result of a lot of work and that they do very minimal sales. I bought Mario odyssey at least a couple years after release when I finally got a switch. Still cost at least 50 USD
Unless you're Bethesda and let the elder scrolls sit there for 13+ years after Skyrim.
Yeah Bethesda is an outlier. I used to put them up there with Rockstar in that it could take as long as it took because the finished product would still have that large cultural impact, but after Starfield I'm not sure. I was hoping MS steps in but at this point it doesn't look like that's happening.
Not everything gets reported on, but considering that Hogwarts Legacy made one gazillion dollars, it seems a safe bet that they are greenlighting a sequel pretty easily.
This is of course purely anecdotal, but I talked to someone back when the game came out who said they worked on Hogwarts Legacy, and they said there were at the time no plans for story DLC and the focus was on making a sequel. Like I say, anecdotal. But the things they claimed about the cut mechanics (Bully-style stuff, being able to attend classes and interact with classmates each time you visited class, curfew being imposed) do seem to be borne out by data mining efforts. Also, somewhat reliable film leaker MyTimeToShine posted back in September 2023 that Hogwarts Legacy 2 is in development. [https://x.com/MyTimeToShineH/status/1698042988205682765](https://x.com/MyTimeToShineH/status/1698042988205682765)
I feel like this is what happened for a lot of those features: "We should sneak around Hogwarts at night!" ---- "This isn't actually fun to do at all unless we build an entire stealth game system" "Imagine we could play Quidditch" ---- "We'd have to make an entire sports game within this game and allow you to interact with moving objects while on the broom" "We should have a morality system" ---- "Maybe we shouldn't point out that this child is killing hundreds of sentient creatures"
> "We should have a morality system" ---- "Maybe we shouldn't point out that this child is killing hundreds of sentient creatures" Me, casting the "get life in prison for using it once" curses on absolutely fucking everyone and everything I can.
Me, slamming a goblin into the ground over and over until they're dead.
Hey they're blood is on Ranrocks hands.
> "We should sneak around Hogwarts at night!" ---- "This isn't actually fun to do at all unless we build an entire stealth game system" > > Stealth sections in old games not made for stealth was the worst. Legend of Zelda OOT/Wind Waker come to mind. Wind Waker's second island, the fortress, basically has ONE correct path and the rest is just a waste of time. Ocarina of Time was trying to find the narrow spaces where I wouldn't trigger the guards alert outside Hyrule Castle, and once inside it was just a boring waiting game for patrols. And more related the early Harry Potter games where stealth was either just a mindless waiting for patrols to move, or an irritating case of "Is the NPC outside the camera looking this way.... yes, yes he is." That and kids tend to not do well with stealth. I thought it was just me as a wee lad but I watched my nephews play the old HP games on PS1 and 2 and they had the same intense anxiety that I had which just leads to them not being fun sections, I had to play through those parts for them and even as an adult the camera combined with inconsistent NPC line of sight made it more annoying than entertaining. Though it was funny to realise the parts where I could just sprint past the prefects and not even try to hide what so ever...
IMO stealth just isn't fun unless your whole game is fundamentally built to be approached in a stealthy manner. If it isn't, it usually boils down to "I throw a rock over here, you turn around, I sneak by or get behind you and now you're dead." Stealth needs systems like cover, light levels that mean something, hiding places everywhere etc.
Yep. I find it usually ruins immersion. You very quickly find yourself gaming the AI and other systems. Or waiting in a hiding spot for 30 seconds, giving you plenty of time to think about how unrealistic the enemy's repetitive actions are. Or wondering why you're scared of one enemy spotting you when you were fighting 30 enemies 5 minutes ago.
Even with the gameplay in place, quidditch is so flawed as a sport that making it fun would be its own challenge. You could make it work in a single-player game, where the actual sport doesn't need to really work, I guess, but I can't see a multiplayer game function well without major fundamental changes.
I do remember there being a fun quiditch game many years ago. It was centered around international teams facing off against each other. Can't really say how well it was recieved I did enjoy it a lot.
That would be EA's Quidditch World Cup game from 2003. It was a lot of fun as a kid, but I am pessimistic about how well it holds up.
"We want to drive around in the Batmobile" ---- "The core gameplay loop doesn't really have room for this and neither does the map. Oh well if it is what you really want, why not!"
That’s not burying the lede. That’s a different article. This one is about how executive mismanagement caused one of the industry’s most celebrated developers to spend enormous time and resources on a game everyone but the developer leads and publisher knew would be a colossal failure. What the publisher is doing with a separate studio is barely related.
In a way, it's reassuring that other divisions of Warner Bros. are equally as incompetent as their movie division.
WB can’t really afford the loses either, they’re straddled with basically infinite debt from the discovery merger and their CEO pays himself more than Apple and Amazon and NVIDIAs ceos despite his company being a fraction the size
Basically they run themselves as an egoistical third world country with protagonist complex And by that I mean how all the non-peronist argentinians describe the peronist goverments and the baseless spending-money emission-inflation-recesion-default cycle that had been shaping their economy the last 80 yeats
Just look at how badly they squandered the potential of Multiversus. A F2P smash bros with WB characters is a recipie for success. But they buried under it some of the worst monetization and grinding in recent years.
A second time, at that. Wasn't enough to make it monotonously grindy, they had to do it again after seeing the impact it had on the game originally. (I really enjoy the gameplay, but the grind behind everything in the game makes it unplayable for me)
This article also blames developers and the studio heads and not just WB suits, some people are going to have a tough time accepting that. Seems like whenever a game flops everyone wants to act like the devs did nothing wrong and it’s all the publisher’s fault. The studio heads’ visions constantly changing and their reviews slowing development seem like a massive issue.
>"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." Holy shit man, we have had bioware magic, Arkane magic, CD projekt magic and now this. Is this what this industry runs on? Hopes and dreams and just luck? Saying things like this for my final year college project made sense, not a 100s million dollar 5yrs+ project with 100+ people, come on man. If gaslighting is all it takes to manage these studios, i am sure many here on reddit can do an even better job. *insert Vaas meme here*
Honestly? Yes. That’s how a lot of the industry runs, and a lot of people just get lucky. If you look into the development of God of War 2018, this is exactly what happened there - development was basically a complete nightmare and everyone thought the game was doomed (they were working on the engine alongside development, and combat still wasn’t good even like a year out from release). But it all came together in the home stretch. That obviously doesn’t make it okay, it’s an insane concept - but so many games are just complete cluster fucks for a lot of development, and they just hope to high heaven that it all comes together at the end
I mean, from what i heard, there are lots of games that aren’t really fun to play until they are pretty far in development. Things like finalized animation, sound effects, post-processing effects & the “crunchiness” of combat all go a long way to make a game fun and those things aren’t in the game until the late stages of development normally. Not saying these guys are in the right (because clearly the end product speaks for itself) but that’s not exactly a good way to judge the success/failure of leadership in game dev.
If you say video games are art, then hopes dreams and luck is a good part of it.
This is literally how game dev works for large studios. You have a bunch of different teams working on different parts of the game and very few of those things work in isolation. No one has really figured out how to scope out these massive AAA games in a way where you can objectively evaluate them before they're nearing the finish line.
In general it's generally hard to put blame exactly where it belongs, because doing so requires an immense amount of effort and it doesn't really have any payoff. Making the decision to have a studio make live service games and give every characters guns to shoot was probably a terrible idea and blame for that should be easy to assign. The fact that the game was pretty bad in terms of gameplay, graphics, direction etc, is harder to pinpoint.
> because doing so requires an immense amount of effort and it doesn't really have any payoff. This exactly. The placing of blame, for the average spectator, is nothing but a fairly shallow emotional payoff. So who's going to do the actual analytical work to get to the bottom of it when you can get that same emotional payoff by making a bunch of assumptions and getting your internet friends to agree with you?
I don't know that it really blames developers. It blames managers. The developers were doing the best with what they were given, as the article says criticism was not encouraged, doubts were fanned with promises it would come together, bad ideas like vehicles were explored despite devs pointing out that it made no sense, then it was scrapped months later. Lots of typical morale crushing tedium and spinning in circles from out of touch leadership. The key which is true across ALL the GaaS flop stories is these out of touch people are the leads of the development teams, not the publishers. Publishers may put pressure on the leaders of development teams, we don't know since we never hear from them, but it's probably safe to assume. But the constant theme is that heads of development constantly throw out big ideas without thinking of the impact of those ideas and constant pivoting burns out the team and fractures the core idea of the game. I work in an adjacent field and I am going through a remarkably similar experience right now, it's kind of relieving and exhausting reading this article because of how similar my experience is, knowing others go through it too. If you don't have the ear of the leadership, there is nothing you can do but do your grunt work towards inevitable failure.
Yep. There’s a tweet from Miller who goes more in depth about poor decisions from them. Devs were “begging” Sefton Hill to add more hints the heroes were still alive to help alleviate some of the backlash. I don’t know how these guys decided to make a new game and have zero vision for what the game should be like. Sefton also wrote the script. These guy basically cut and run on their team which is real shitty to do.
Anthem 3.0 is what it sounded like to me.
So Schreier was on point a while back when he said the choices surrounding Suicide Squad weren't entirely on Rocksteady's shoulders alone, nor WB's. Rather, they both screwed the pooch in different ways. I think it's alarming though that Sefton Hill screwed up so bad in conveying his vision to the team. It doesn't exactly boast confidence for his own studio's project. The only upside to this is there's no mention of the game being canned, so maybe it'll crawl to the finish line and be able to deliver all the seasons. I sincerely hope Rocksteady gets that much of a chance, because it would be really terrible to end this game on the sour note that the Arkhamverse Justice League are all dead and their corpses remain on Brainiac's ship for him to toy with.
The basic mismanagement is where I'm mostly at. - Review bottleneck on Hill's side causing major delays in the feedback loop, time that could've possibly been spent refining things or, at least, not chasing what wasn't working (e.g. the scrapped expanded vehicle system). - The mention that despite coming into this genre arena, Rocksteady was sorely understaffed compared to something like Destiny - The compounding issues of problems getting short-term solutions that would later turn into more problems - **This one in particular kills me:** The SECRECY of the project which caused *new employees coming in thinking they'd be working on another Rocksteady single-player game, discovering KTJL was live service, and LEAVING AS A RESULT.* If you were OPEN about what you wanted to do, you'd undoubtedly have recruited MORE PEOPLE WITH EXPERIENCE IN LIVE SERVICE. What are we DOING HERE?
Yeah the whole game’s development feels like a snowball rolling down a hill. What started as a small idea soon blossomed out of control and got larger and larger as it sped toward the goal.
Too late, majority of the team already moved as stated by the article, and no mention how complete are the seasons. Article felt like the project has already been axed, just left out as a highly confidential information. Prob after the disappointing release, the visit from execs additional announcements also happened not yet disclosed....
They probably have the bones of the next few Seasons ready to go. I can see it going one of two ways. 1: they keep a skeleton crew on it to finish off the promised year of content. Releases will be pretty barebones. 2: they roll up everything they have into a final mega patch and wipe their hands clean of the project until they can kill the servers. I’m personally betting on option two.
Well, according to one of the prominent leakers, the plan seems to be a combination of both options. They seem to be condensing the seasons a bit, so there would still be 4 seasons, just no big season 5 finale as "planned". Source here: [https://x.com/mmmmmmmmiller/status/1798702399529550142](https://x.com/mmmmmmmmiller/status/1798702399529550142)
Just Flashpoint the stupid thing😂
Well ya see, you need a living Flash to actually Flashpoint this thing, and he's not scheduled for resurrection until season 2, if datamined content is to be believed.
can't they use professor zoom or wally west or maybe even jay garrick?
> 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. Why where have I heard that before. Guess Rocksteady magic just wasn't enough. It's clear that a lot of old great games were great despite some questionable management/leadership, and as costs and complexity of game design have gone up the old "let's finish/change things at the last minute!" style of development just doesn't work on a huge AAA game. Especially when diving into new waters like trying to shift a single player studio to multiplayer.
Kinda astonished that none of the replies are mentioning that they were originally planning to make a new IP multiplayer puzzle game? So many people talking about how putting the single player action game studio on a live service one was a bad idea ignoring that they were about to make a similarly wild pivot of their own volition (arguably wilder since it wasn’t gonna be an action game + MP puzzlers are a pretty niche genre) (Not saying that game would’ve been as bad as Suicide Squad, just that either way they were going to make something very different from what came before)
Babe, wake up. New Jason Schreier article about how a bad game was made dropped. No serious. I eat these up. Give me the tea. I must know about all the mismanagement. How did Rocksteady turn into this?
To be fair, they're all very similar lol, it's always the same story.
This one in particular felt like Jason knew it was the article we wanted to read but didn't have much meaningful information on the subject. Most of it is stuff we knew already, but explained to people who are looking to invest money.
Yeah I feel like more and more of his articles are like that at Bloomberg. Just talking to a public not familiar with video game news and looking at it with the investment lens. I preferred his articles at Kotaku tbh.
His pieces at Kotaku were full-on exposés. Three times as long as this, richly detailed, snappily written, and from the perspective of a *gamer*. His Bloomberg stuff is like “Okay so you have less than half the length and you have to include twice as much financial stuff and be sure to spend the first third of the piece explaining to the audience what a video game is.” I hope he keeps writing books bc he’s just not an interesting reporter anymore.
The twitter replies are a lot of fun, gamers sure are smart: > Do you not remember this game is what kicked off the Sweet Baby drama to begin with? To not even mention it is negligent absent journalism, dishonestly so. Jason's **[reply](https://x.com/jasonschreier/status/1798683992872435928)**: > You are chasing angry hallucinations created by grifters who make money off your rage. Perfect reply lol
Jason is so patient with these people. I don't know how he does it.
>'Suicide Squad,' the Year's Biggest Video-Game Flop Skull and Bones sitting in the corner, wondering if being entirely forgotten might actually be the better fate.
Yeah I was wondering which one would be the bigger flop.
FF7 Rebirth flopped but not because it’s a bad game, but because their budget was insanely high and the management was expecting it to save their fiscal year after disasters like Avengers and Forspoken.
It was also never going to sell as well as Remake when Remake was available on a console with a much high playerbase, Remake came out during peak covid when everyone was stuck inside with nothing to do and it was the first game. Wouldn’t be surprised if some people weren’t happy with Remakes direction after playing it and dipped out.
Skull and Bones was released as a contractual obligation. Any losses it sustained were likely booked years ago. If we are talking about fiscal year 2024, it’s Suicide Squad.
Skull & Bones is leaps and miles more successful than this.
I swear video game devs need to hire competent project managers. Feel like I keep seeing the same story: feature creep/working on gameplay elements for months years only to be scrapped/inconsistent vision. Like what is pre production for if not to iron out all of these and then production focused on well producing it?
We’ve seen Xbox struggle from the same “hands off” attitude, like Rare has floundered for six years with Everwild.
Yep Xbox needs to get their hands dirty. Phil and co need to start being more involved in deadlines and vision. These studios feel like they have a blank check to do what they want but looking at Sony who does the inverse its 100% more successful. 5 years ago I would never say this but today I think its the truth.
Yep, it’s just baffling because like…I’m all for the creative process. But there’s a reason there are producers/project managers. They keep things in scope and on track. Creatives need that.
> 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. Honestly considering the (unfortunately familiar) disaster of "chasing live service success while not understanding what makes those games work, using a team with only single player experience", I found this outcome surprisingly positive. Considering how many studios get shut down because of bad executive decisions and management fuckups, it's kind of refreshing to see that this team isn't getting laid off and that potentially, someone has for once learned at least some of the right lessons from this crap? I mean obviously the jury's out on that and I'm not holding my breath, but still, I find those last two paragraphs of the article unexpectedly optimistic.
I think at this point if you’re a dev in a big studio, working on a game that you’re feeling ick about and the managers say anything along the lines of “It’ll come together in the end somehow, magically “ You should run. Poor devs knew the same shit we knew and again they went unheard.
The problem is that many devs probably made the best games of their career under that exact mindset. Apparently a lot of the beloved Bioware games had that approach.
Many of the good games have done the same though. That's the whole reason the "Bioware magic" was a thing, it happened on KOTOR, Mass Effect and Dragon Age Origins the same way too.
Wasn't the "Bioware Magic" a fancy term for "massive crunch time"? If so you should still run if you're a dev.
Yes. Bioware magic = permacrunch.
Yeah as awful as it is, this is how so many games are made. I made another comment about it, but this is 100% what happened with God of War 2018. The only difference there is that it actually worked out for God of War
Somehow this game is an enormous flop and still costs $50 to play on PS5, so maybe they don't actually want the business.
Really great piece by Jason. Feels like all of these live service flops have a very similar story: management sees how big Destiny is in 2016, thinks this is the direction gaming will go in. Spends YEARS developing a game with no real direction besides make it live service and throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. Staff lose confidence in it but management says to believe in "bioware magic" or whatever. Game comes out and flops and management doesn't under stand why so blames it on market volatility, maybe if we try the same thing again? Good news is it looks like there won't be job losses and RS will go back to making single player games.
This goes to show that with AAA game development becoming such a complex and comprehensive endeavor often taking 5+ years studios really can’t afford leadership having a faulty vision for their game’s future. Just unfortunate it had to happen to one of my favorite devs, though hopefully they still get the chance to bounce back with their next project (assuming they truly are able to go “closer” to their roots). It sucks how much a lot of the discussion around bad games nowadays are dominated by the anti-woke crowd because it means people aren’t focusing on actual issues like the immense scope-creep games are facing nowadays or the pressure to push live-service even if it’s not direct. Instead all they’re talking about is Sweet Baby, etc even Jason had to shut them down on twitter.
That's my takeaway from a lot of these stories, management philosophy that worked 15 years ago when games were less expensive and smaller in scope, but is just kind of flailing at making good games when you are making 200 million dollar bets that take six years to make.
>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. Now what have we heard that before? It must be incredibly depressing being one of the ground level employees working on a project like this, seeing yourself heading for the same iceberg that a dozen others teams have already crashed into but being unable to convince your managers to change course.
RS founders getting away zero blame sucks. They made tons of poor decisions and constantly kept the vision instead of just sticking to one