Suicide Squad Review: Live-Service Monetization Left Staff Drained
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League landed with a wave of disappointment, and it never managed to escape the perception that it was both underbaked and built around aggressive monetization. The result was a live-service pitch that felt microtransaction-heavy while lacking the core features players expected—an especially awkward fit for a studio best known for delivering polished single-player experiences.
It didn’t take long for the conversation to shift back to how the project came together. In the aftermath, murmurs surfaced from within Rocksteady that the studio never genuinely wanted to pursue a live-service direction, and that Warner Bros. pushed for specific monetization and design choices that turned out to be especially unpopular.
Suicide Squad Burned Out Two Designers
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, two former Rocksteady developers described what the long development road did to morale inside the team while building Suicide Squad. Their comments frame the project as a slow grind where the pressure to spend more and earn it back gradually replaced the desire to make the game better.
The basic pattern, according to them, was that longer development timelines translated into higher budgets, which then increased anxiety from Warner Bros. to recover the investment. That escalation reportedly brought more executive pressure to monetize the game in ways that felt intrusive, and those decisions were still fresh when the title finally launched—leading to significant player backlash.
“I stopped feeling like I was making games”
- Axel Rydby said he felt like his work shifted from game design to spreadsheet-driven decisions.
- Johnny Armstrong said progress felt stalled, with teams forced to “run to stand still.”
- Both described development pressure that made the project feel draining rather than creative.
Axel Rydby, who started as a lead designer and later became the game’s director, said the situation made him question what he was doing day to day. He explained that he began to feel removed from the craft of building games, describing the work as following “some elusive” marketing-related spreadsheet that he felt nobody could clearly justify.
Rydby also pointed out that Rocksteady’s earlier success with the Batman Arkham series helped set expectations internally. The studio was open to trying something new with Suicide Squad, but the mandate that it become a live-service product was not something the team was enthusiastic about.
Development, in their telling, became especially rough because Rocksteady had built its reputation on single-player action-adventure design. Turning that mindset into a “forever game” meant building under the assumption that content would never run out, a demand that collided with how the team naturally worked.
Johnny Armstrong, a former designer, said that the effort didn’t translate into a feeling of real improvement. He described a sense that everyone was stuck in motion without actually reaching a better version of the game, saying the team felt like it had to keep “running to stand still.”
Delays were also described as not fully addressing deeper problems. The picture painted is a familiar nightmare scenario: the game wasn’t satisfying to anyone involved, but it still had to ship so the development costs could be recovered.
Armstrong added that the toll became personal as time went on. He said he felt “everything drained” from him, that he couldn’t do it again, and that he could feel himself breaking down—whether or not that meant leaving the industry entirely.
Next up for Rocksteady—and the former team
Rocksteady has been reported to be working on a new Batman game that’s still “years away.” Meanwhile, Wonder Woman was also said to have been rebooted, suggesting the publisher’s superhero pipeline is continuing to reshuffle while the studio moves forward.
Rydby said he became disillusioned with the industry after shipping Suicide Squad. He argued that the sector is “severely losing our way,” describing a time when passion projects were pursued because developers genuinely wanted to make them—and because they hoped others would love them too. In his view, that spirit faded into a mindset of simply hoping a release sells and generates revenue.
For Armstrong and Rydby, the story doesn’t end with one troubled game. The two have teamed up to create Secret of Circadia, an RPG deckbuilder that includes roguelike elements. They’ve launched a Kickstarter aimed at raising $11,447 (€10,000) to fund development of the project.
