‘Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’ Continues To Cause Pain For Warner Bros. As Developer Rocksteady Sees Another Round Of Layoffs
In adding another notch to its metaphorical casualty count, the recent ‘throwing-in-of-the-towel’ by the ill-fated Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has resulted in yet another round of job cuts for the live-service disaster’s developer, Rocksteady Studios.
This news, curiously enough, was not publicly announced by either the studio themselves or their parent company Warner Bros. Games, but rather by Eurogamer Editor-in-Chief Tom Phillips, who learned of the staffing shake-up directly from “half a dozeen staff impacted by the redundancies”.
Though it is currently unknown just how many staff members have been let go, the insiders who spoke to Phillips informed noted that the “roles impacted include members of Rocksteady’s programming and artist teams, as well as more QA staff.”
As noted above, this is far from the first instance of layoffs to be undertaken in the wake of Task Force X’s mission failure.
In September 2024, with the studio ostensibly realizing that the game truly had no hope of finding a ‘second wind’ with players, Phillips learned that Rocksteady cut their QA department “in half”, reducing its roster “from 33 team members to 14, with poor sales of Suicide Squad directly cited as a reason for its ‘restructuring’.”
From there, December 2024 saw developer Rocksteady Studios inform players that following the upcoming conclusion of the game’s Season 4 and addition of Deathstroke to the titular team’s playable roster, they would no longer be producing any new Suicide Squad content.
“With Deathstroke joining the roster, the Suicide Squad’s crusade against Brainiac is drawing to an end,” wrote the developers in an official blog post. “Season 4 will finish up with Episode 8, which is scheduled to release in January 2025, and that will serve as the last seasonal Episode for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
And as a result of this end-of-support announcement, Warner Bros. Games would subsequently cut 99 employees from their Montréal studio, which had been using their previous experience working on their own DC live-service title Gotham Knights to provide support to Rocksteady and Suicide Squad.
Representing roughly a third of the satellite office’s total staff and primarily affecting its QA team, one now-former employee who spoke to Stéphanie Dupuis of the French-language Canadian news outlet Radio-Canada specifically cited the fact that the game “was in development for so long, and launched with a lot of problems” as a reason for the layoffs.
“Players were disappointed,” he told. “WB Games should have pulled the plug on the game.”
Ultimately, given just how absolutely devastating Suicide Squad was for Warner Bros.’ finances (the developer reported taking at least a $200 million hit thanks to its failure), it’s unlikely these will be the last round of layoffs to come as a result of Braniac’s attempt to invade Earth.
But of course, only time will tell if this will turn out to be the case.
In the interim, current PlayStation Plus subscribers can snag Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League completely free as part of this month’s offering of free games – though why they would particularly want to remains unclear.
And though membership on the titular team is currently not free on any other console, recent months have regularly seen the game go on sale across all platforms for under $10.
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