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What just happened? In a game industry that has been plagued by layoffs in recent times, releasing a massive-budget title that flops hard is going to make an already bad situation worse. Rocksteady, for example, is reportedly laying off employees in the wake of the disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a game that led to parent company Warner Bros. taking a $200 million loss.
Sources have told Eurogamer that the abysmal performance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is having repercussions for Rocksteady staff. The company's QA team has been struck the hardest, losing more than half its members as employee figures were cut from 33 to 15. The poor sales of Suicide Squad have been directly blamed for this "restructuring."
Some staff members from outside QA have also lost their jobs. One person wrote on social media over the weekend that they had been made redundant in the middle of their paternity leave.
The staff members being let go include new and junior staff as well as several long-term employees who had been with Rocksteady for more than five years.
It seems strange that a studio would get rid of half its QA team when it's trying to bounce back from a flop. Remaining staff say that some of the dismissed team members had specialist knowledge, and the departures mean those left must now take on more work. Workers say that Rocksteady's senior management has acknowledged that product quality is going to suffer as a result of the layoffs.
Being responsible for the much loved-Batman Arkham series meant that there was plenty of anticipation for Rocksteady's Suicide Squad. The game was delayed several times, and some bad pre-release previews didn't bode well for fans. Surely enough, Suicide Squad arrived as a live service game in January to average-to-poor reviews and an even worse reception from most players.
In June, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported that Suicide Squad failed for numerous reasons, including a constantly shifting vision, a culture of rigid perfectionism, and a genre pivot that was ill-suited for the studio. Warner Bros. eventually revealed it had incurred a $200 million loss on the game.