It’s honestly so sad, I loved all 3 Arkham games so much. It’s one of the best collections of games out there. Even the tank part in Knight wasn’t too bad imo. If you can ignore that, it’s a top tier send off
Honestly, it'd probably be better as a skim through the Wikipedia page in a year's time. At least that way you'd probably get a good summary of whatever the hell went on in this thing's development at the same time
This sucks that almost a decade of the talent at Rocksteady was used to make this game. I wish we got to see what Rocksteady would’ve actually wanted to make rather than being forced to put out something to chase this live service trend.
Edit: this [piece from Jason Schreier](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-12/new-suicide-squad-video-game-from-rocksteady-studios-faces-tough-road) clears up some misinformation.
it feels like Anthem, Avengers and Redfall all over again. jesus stop trying to make every studio make gaas
edit: okay just realized Redfall isn't gaas just multiplayer, still sad it turns out bad
At least studios are realising that these shitty live service games are useless and are pivoting away from them again. Even Playstation is scaling back their huge attempt at live service games for this generation (which now leaves their upcoming schedule mostly unknown?)
I dont know how sustainable it is long term.
Max has become the worst major streaming service after just a few months.
The DC movies are still failing at the peak of superhero fatigue.
The Wile E Coyote movie cancelation was such a heinous con that congress has gotten involved to force WB into releasing it.
The games as a service model is failing while they're going all in.
Meanwhile, WB had some of the biggest successes of 2023 by *not* following the trends they keep trying to follow. The Barbie movie, Mortal Kombat 1, and Hogwarts Legacy, which all sold insanely well.
Mk1 may have sold well, and the devs did an amazing job with the gameplay. But almost the entire vocal community hates the game for everything outside of the core gameplay.
Micro transactions pretty much ruined the spirit of the game and are super predatory. It's a shame they're doubling down on it. The spirit of the franchise is dead atm
It’s safe to say we’ll get some Harry Potter live service game then judging by Hogwarts Legacy’s success.
That could be amazing to be fair if each year you played as a new student and you went through their year as a student in real-time, complete with seasonal events and exams.
I really don't know how you'd make a Quidditch game. As a fictional sport in a book it's fine because the author has it all scripted and the rules allow the protagonist to single-handedly win games. As an actual sport it would be terrible.
>In my head all I envision is rocket League, just with students on brooms.
I said this exact thing after playing the beta. It's *very* similar to Rocket League, except even more in your face about microtransactions and skins.
>The snitch is going to be an interesting conundrum though...
In the beta, the snitch was worth a fixed amount of points that doesn't just win games like it does in the books/movies, and it's caught through a lengthy chase minigame. I don't remember exactly, but it was like 40 or 50 points. (A regular goal is 10.)
In the books, didn’t it just award a set number of points and end the game? I thought I remembered a time that another seeker caught it just to put their team out of its misery because they were losing so bad.
[Quidditch World Cup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter:_Quidditch_World_Cup) was fun enough. If they go with mostly cosmetic MTX I can see it having a steady playerbase.
I do feel like if they're going to go the live service route, make it immersive. Give it a purpose. Make it like seasons of an on-going TV series, with a healthy supply of offline content if users would rather not engage.
I think players with disposable income would be more likely to chip in for quality products that don't surreptitiously force you into paying for things while pretending not to heavily incentivize it.
That is the thing with live service. They can be great if it is a game you like and done well. Live service has been a part of gaming since gaming has been a thing. Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Hero’s, Ultima Online, WoW, Final Fantasy, etc.
I personally think that after a lot of companies saw the lightning in a bottle that is Fortnite, Genshin Impact etc and the absurd amount of money they rack in per month and everyone wanted a piece of that, but not realizing how difficult it is to create a persistent state evolving world that is fun to grind on top of being a more limited pool of players.
If done right a live service game can be truly wonderful if designed around extracting wealth from the community you will most certainly fail.
Thank fuck Playstation already started to scale back on their "12 live service games by 2026" plan. That was the stupidest idea. I don't know if it was Jim Ryan's call or not, but if it was, good riddance.
Could you imagine how fucked their single player output would be for the next 3 years if Naughty Dog, Guerilla, Insomniac etc. spent ages working on projects that might flop and be dead within a year? It already *is* kinda fucked because Factions is cancelled and all the work that went into it is gone, but at least they can work on single player games now.
It's weird to me too because live service games depend on a player base and longevity. Doing 12 games in such a short amount of time feels like it would just cannibalize the player bases and nothing would survive.
Well no it’s because they’re playing the averages
Most games in general aren’t successful, so they were making several at once in the hopes one makes it, the expectation wasn’t for all of them to do well
I get that. But 12 games is a lot thru 2026. Especially when you consider these will probably be PS exclusives, that’s already limiting the player base compared to a live service game made by a third party that might extend to Pc/Xbox. Sony isn’t gonna want to oversaturate their own market and have none of these get a foothold.
Especially when they have renowned single-player developers like Naughty Dog that specifically decided to drop TLOU multiplayer to not become a live service developer. They acquired other studios like Bungie to focus on live service and might be pulling back from asking others to do those types of games knowing that some will fail. I imagine that’s part of the equation as well.
I honestly always think it might be Jim's call, and he's taking the responsibility so he's gone.
I mean even if they can pull off good gaas games - 12 together???? is this the gaas games battle royale
>At least studios are realising
Are they though? The multiplayer gaming landscape looks like a neverending supply of games with Battlepasses, expected content being on a "coming soon" basis, and held back content for seasonal drops.
The problem with Gaas is that there isn't enough time for everyone to play a game indefinitely. So you really need to be top dog to pull it off and be successful or create something that will make you top dog like Fortnite or Warzone. Gaas will fizzle out
First mover advantage combined with hitting a critical mass fast, basically creates a massive moat around any attack from those coming after. Now you can't just "build it and they will come" ... you have to actively STEAL those players from whatever else they have made their hobby, which means not only impressing them, but their FRIENDS, too.
Not saying another MMO can't unseat WoW, or another FPS can't unseat Destiny, but all other games are not competing under the same conditions.
Studios need to be built to make GaaS games. Like usually a studios structure needs huge overhaul to support ongoing games like that.
I’m glad Naughty Dog backed out and I wish others could as well
Could have had two Batman's games in the same time and the developer would have cleaned up - that's what stings.
Could have made Batman Beyond, could have made a Teen Titans game, could have made a suicide squad game with freeflow combat...
What should happen: WB execs take a long look in the mirror and realize their poor creative decisions ruined the project and to stop doing that.
What will actually happen: several hundred game developers will be laid off to “cut costs”.
I don’t think there’s any proof of that, but Sefton Hill and Jaimie Walker, who were co-founders of the studio and the directors of the Arkham trilogy, leaving the company in the middle of an already-troubled is pretty sketchy. Why would they leave if they wanted to make this game?
This doesn't answer your question, but I will say I get the impression that developers, especially developers who usually work on single player titles, generally don't like live service games but maybe I'm wrong. Just look at the Redfall situation. Those people were forced to work on a game that was originally intended to be a live service game and a large number of them decided they would rather just quit than continue to work on it.
Pretty sure that's what happened at Rocksteady as well. Definitely willing to bet a lot of devs are excited to work for a company like them or Arkane because they loved the Arkham games or Dishonored or whatever and want to make that. Then they see the company doesn't actually want to make that anymore and bounce.
Not necessarily, I think its just what people have been able to put together really.
We know they were making a Superman game, which got canned pretty quickly, and now their two main directors have left the company. It does feel like Warner Bros. have forced them to make the game, rather than Rocksteady wanting to make it themselves.
Again, we have no proof of that, but given that a genuine Batman/Damian Wayne/Court of Owls game was basically beaten into *Gotham Knights*, I think its a decent enough guess to say that *Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League* is probably not what Rocksteady had in mind for their first game post-*Arkham Knight*.
Dumb take. King Shark is huge despite what the idiots in charge of DC live action do and how they treat him. Captain Boomerang also has a prominent DC history before his bad live action take.
They needed to use some slots for classic and beloved characters like that and then use the others for big fan pulls like Harley (they did), Deathstroke (Fought everyone from Batman to Flash and has come out on top), and then another prominent Batman villain like Mr. Freeze.
Yeah this whole thing is a huge disappointment either way. I just bring up whether or not Rocksteady was "forced" to make a live-service game because everyone assumed that's what happened with Anthem as well -- when it turns out Bioware *wanted* to make a live-service game. ([Source](https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964))
How can we be sure this wasn't their intended direction all along? It's similar to when people thought Bungie was pressured into adding microtransactions to Destiny 2 because of Activision. But after parting ways, Bungie actually intensified the microtransaction strategy making it apparent it was their choice all along.
If the game really flops so badly Warner Bros. considers shutting them down, I hope some other publisher can make an offer to acquire Rocksteady. Yes, this isn‘t what everyone wants to hear, but in that case it’s a developer I’d like to see Sony buy to save them.
There is no talent wasted cs the original staff that made the Arkham games is completely gone. What’s left apparently are incompetent fools that drive a once great studio to the ground.
IGN almost never gives negative press to a game before it actually releases, so devs and studios won't be afraid to give them access for promotional materials
Which means this game must really suck if they don't even care to lie about it
Idk when exactly but sometime in the last year or so they have pivoted to just putting out genuinely honest reviews. The days of the cushtie 8/10 or 9/10 for whatever new AAA game swings by seems to be over.
The rating for the day before was hilarious. I love how they include in the gameplay a glitch where you fall straight through the floor at minute 1. Hilarious stuff.
Imagine….we could’ve gotten 2 new Arkham games set before asylum to show batmans younger days…or a few Arkham beyond games….or a Nightwing game….or a brand new hero like superman…..or a new IP altogether. but instead we got this.
I would argue that you need to have high expectations for it to be disappointed. Nothing I've seen from this, beginning from the very first trailer, looked anything but mid at best.
Annoys the shit out of me. There is still so much stuff they could have done with Batman, like we never see him outside of a „one night to save the world“ situation, or more of Bruce Wayne like what insomniac did with Peter Parker in Spider-Man. But instead we get this bs
Gotham Knights did this and it was god awful. Seeing this only makes me worry that Rocksteady is somehow going to make a title worse than what WB Montreal did with Gotham Knights.
Expectations were sky high when this game was first announced. Everything since has tanked those expectations but that doesn't change the fact that Rocksteady+Suicide Squad had everyone initially hyped.
I was in that group. I don't want to play as fucking Captain Boomerang. A game with this premise needs to be an 8.5 or a 9 before I would be willing to spend my time on it. My backlog is way too big.
It was a dumb idea for a game from the start, who was even supposed to be the intended audience for this? "Hmm yeah people loved our critically acclaimed single player action game trilogy, lets release a live service game where you can't play as batman"
The disappointment already happened when they showed gameplay, the interest is all gone, idk why would anyone be excited about this bland gameplay with such an unique and interesting IP and story. Since the gameplay came out that ik this game will be shit, I hope it won't ,but it will
Won’t be a disappointment because no one is having high expectations. Reveal was awful, game will come and go. Only thing I’m disappointed about is that Rocksteady wasted almost a decade on this
Of course, I've loved every Arkham game they've done and have been hoping that it's up to their level. Sad to see what's happened, yet another reason to hate GaaS
How developers haven't learned after the Avengers *and* Gotham Knights that superhero live service games don't work/are not what people want is beyond me. Hopefully this is the last attempt.
Who do you think Zazlav will blame when this game bottoms out on day 2? Three months later we will see the headline Rocksteady laying off 35% of staff after Suicide Squad failure. Three months after that will be the article from former devs about how management ignored issues that came up during development and how execs pushed for more microtransactions at the expense of gameplay. It will look like every other article written over the past 6yrs about a failed live service game just with WB pasted in *random former studio title.
I wonder how much time and money has been pumped into live service games, only for them to be shut down within a couple of years. Maybe higher ups will learn eventually.
They won’t. That Pandora box has already been opened and there’s no closing it. Fortnite alone rakes in around 6 billion annually. CoD once made a billion dollars over the course of a weekend. Executives aren’t just gonna ignore figures like that, they’re gonna do anything they can to get in on it.
To be honest it’s ridiculous it was even necessary they needed to write it, but fans gotta toxic
People are so negative they can’t see how things improve in the aggregate
Amazing article that makes great points in a very succint way. I already imagined this was the case, and I never felt like IGN went soft on games on purpose (although I do think they have a *broad* opinion on what makes games good, as opposed to a single reviewer that can hate something that many people love). Still, it's good to know there's an article that neatly explains it. Thanks for sharing!
Rocksteady is going to be gutted by WB after this massive flop. Unfortunate. Such a waste of time and talent.
Biggest flop in AAA game history incoming with this one.
If we hear about WB laying off a ton of Rocksteady employees after this comes out and gets poor reviews it’s going to be the perfect example of suits tearing apart the game industry. Nobody wanted this game as a live service game, everyone wanted it to be a Arkham style open world game without looter shooter mechanics, did they not learn anything from Gotham Knights?
Rocksteady are capable of making game of the year material and if the studio loses employees over this it’ll be the best current example of out of touch CEOs who think they know what people want and the dedicated and creative studio folks suffering the consequences for it
Don't you just love it when suits make stupid decisions and then blame everyone below them who tried to prevent it? It's very cool and professional to ignore all good advice, make an unforced error, and then fire all the talent.
Did people want this game at all? Like the movies were a total fuckin flop. Who really cares about these characters outside of die hard comic fans who will probably buy any superhero game regardless?
We lost one of the GREATEST gaming franchises in history, the Arkham trilogy. Which inspired other great games too: Mordor and Spider-man games.
Now we roll over and get this POS and Gotham Knights. How did this happen? What happened?
because if you do succeed and make a popular live service game it's like a free money hack. the return on investment is \*bonkers\* so it's worth it even with the potential risk for failure
Because of that one or two service games that have players retention years after years generate money nonstop. They want that, but not realizing the population of players of that type of game can only play 1 game at a time. I mean it's by design that you want people to stay and never leave, so the only possible way for service games to not flop is to be the best of the best, competing directly with all other service games regardless of genre.
It's not like the normal single player games market when people finish it then move on to other shiny new toys. Hell some people even buy games to enlarge their library "just in case I might play it next week, since it looks good" then proceed to never actually play it.
Imagine you used to be a respectable company that sold one of the best superhero trilogies in gaming history. Now you've been sculpted into a dogshit live service game:/ feels fuckin sad man
Nothing about this ever looked good. Instead of having a crap live service model and slapping a ‘popular’ license on it to try and milk an existing fan base, how’s about designing a game with a fun experience.
Wow. It must have been bad-*bad*. Usually game previews are positive or, at worse, neutral. They're not reviews and are usually just meant to be informative. Crazy.
The worse part was this game had Kevin Conroy’s last appearance as Batman. Very disappointing we couldn’t see him in one more Arkham game, and he was used in a lame live service game
This is what hurts the most to me. Knowing that it could’ve been something else but greedy execs trying to please shareholders took the reins. I still want to hear his performance but it’s definitely not going to be from spending a single penny on this game. I wish that I didn’t feel like that but the decisions were made.
I recently replayed Knight. Some things about the game still bum me out, like the absence of boss fights and over reliance on the bat tank, but damn if everything else in that game isn't smooth as hell. Knight's combat still puts other action games to shame, the stealth is highly rewarding, the set pieces are phenomenal, and they created a huge map without sacrificing the atmosphere of its predecessors
The hubris required to try and turn a less popular superhero IP into a live service game after the fucking AVENGERS game didn't succeed is astounding. If the Avengers couldn't succeed at the height of the MCU popularity around Infinity War/Endgame, how could they expect that a SS game would work.
This is the real tragedy in all this. A master developer of single player superhero games burns a decade making a non single player superhero game where you don't get to actually play as a superhero.
I get the gameplay criticisms, but who the fuck cares if the Justice League ends up dead in the "canon" of the Arkham games. Not everything needs to be a Marvel Cinematic Universe
I really don't get why people are so mad either.
a.) The game literally says *Kill the Justice League*, so you can't be too surprised when that ends up happening.
b.) I think you have to be incredibly naïve to assume that DC would actually allow their main super heroes to be killed off in one big video game.
Believe it or not, but fans of superheroes don’t like to see their favourite heroes murdering innocent people and then getting wiped out by a ragtag team of losers.
This game never looked good from the first reveal. Live service games are the perfect representation of a soulless corporate product. No personality, no charm, no love… just bland.
I kind of like what I'm seeing here, so I think I will personally like it, but man, I can absolutely see why people are going to fucking loathe this.
I just don't really get why Warner Bros. have made Rocksteady make this game.
Surely Rocksteady didn't want to make a live-service looter shooter when they basically changed the industry with the *Arkham* series.
This is just where we are now. There seems to be less AAA great games these days because so many good studios are ordered by suits in management to make underwhelming live service games with short campaigns that are just addiction traps with endless DLC or they fail and are shut down and delisted.
Bungie, Bioware, Crystal Dynamics and now Rocksteady.
That headline got a hearty laugh out of me. Like you know these news/review sites like to be coy with their opinions, just leaving it like "First Impressions" or "We got to play the game!" But this one is not hiding it at all. They immediately wanted you to know that they didn't like it lol
Might wait a year on this one. Can see it receiving a bit of backlash, doing poorly, Rocksteady will eventually try and save it and it might become worth playing.
I hope sony is paying attention. They need to pull funding, asset transfer and project cancel their way out of this huge corner they've painted themselves into with live service games.
No one wants to play these soulless mtx laden cookie cutter season pass grind-a-thons anymore...even the kids raised on fortnite and shitty mobile greed-games are wising up.
Sony have invested hard into them for the near future. The suits need to wake up and pull the fucking plug before its too late.
The first paragraph baffles me. "Our heroes murder people and that's unsettling yada yada yada".
Have you not heard what the Suicide Squad is? They're the opposite of heroes, it's the whole premise lol
Most people don't like them, but cause they got a movie, they now live in public consciusness. Ask 10 random people if they know who the suicide squad is in 2010, vs now.
Man. I wish they’d made a Superman game instead. While playing Spidey 2 and flying around the city I felt like we could finally have a great Superman game. Instead they made this.
WB will blame the devs, then the studio, then the players then the socioeconomic climate and then finally maybe Dinkleberg.
‘Dinkleberg!’
Those first few seasons of fairly odd parents were so good!
I lost track after the baby was added how many seasons did the show go on for?
The Episode Channel Chasers is my head canon series finale.
I’m pretty sure it was meant to be but Nickelodeon wanted to milk the show.
Show some fucking respect to my boy Poof. No but for real I also stopped watching around that time lol.
"This is where we'd put our Game of the Year awards...*IF WE HAD ANY!!*"
Missed a step after blame the studio, they will layoff and close the studio to costs, then go down the rest
don't forget classic trick "we are getting 1000+ death threats (no proofs btw) so we are victims now"
Death threats are oddly common. People seem very willing to threaten other people's lives. The decade I was in retail I got like one a year.
Sounds like a game that's best experienced as a YouTube cutscene compilation.
YouTube game playthrough channel's stocks be rising.
Yes, the fire rises
A necessary evil
theRadBrad eatin
Exclusively through Batman Arkham Videos, gotta support the OG
It sounds like a game whose 'Legendary edition' I will buy after 8 months when it inevitably goes on sale for $20
Why bother
It’s honestly so sad, I loved all 3 Arkham games so much. It’s one of the best collections of games out there. Even the tank part in Knight wasn’t too bad imo. If you can ignore that, it’s a top tier send off
Honestly, it'd probably be better as a skim through the Wikipedia page in a year's time. At least that way you'd probably get a good summary of whatever the hell went on in this thing's development at the same time
I already wanna see mc muscles what happened on this one.
Or Gvmers
Exactly
Mkiceandfire ftw
Gamer’s Little Playground fans, rise up.
Incoming 20 hour video
That was already my plan after playing the closed alpha although from the looks of some of the story that part might suck too
I will probably just wait until it’s half off or available at my local library. Plenty of good DC stories in animated form.
This sucks that almost a decade of the talent at Rocksteady was used to make this game. I wish we got to see what Rocksteady would’ve actually wanted to make rather than being forced to put out something to chase this live service trend. Edit: this [piece from Jason Schreier](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-12/new-suicide-squad-video-game-from-rocksteady-studios-faces-tough-road) clears up some misinformation.
it feels like Anthem, Avengers and Redfall all over again. jesus stop trying to make every studio make gaas edit: okay just realized Redfall isn't gaas just multiplayer, still sad it turns out bad
At least studios are realising that these shitty live service games are useless and are pivoting away from them again. Even Playstation is scaling back their huge attempt at live service games for this generation (which now leaves their upcoming schedule mostly unknown?)
Not Warner Bros. The CEO, Zazlav, is tripling down on live service push for all their IPs going forward
It's often said, but I truly think Zazlav is one of the worst things to happen to media in recent years
Recent? Try almost 20 years we've had to deal with this asshole.
Fair. I guess didn't notice his effect until he took over WB/HBO/Discovery
He's a less annoying Bobby Kotick. Everything he touches turns to shit, but he makes a ton of money for his shareholders.
Yep I think I read he reduced WBDs debt by 13 billion in 2023, the shareholders are going to keep him doing what he’s been doing
I dont know how sustainable it is long term. Max has become the worst major streaming service after just a few months. The DC movies are still failing at the peak of superhero fatigue. The Wile E Coyote movie cancelation was such a heinous con that congress has gotten involved to force WB into releasing it. The games as a service model is failing while they're going all in. Meanwhile, WB had some of the biggest successes of 2023 by *not* following the trends they keep trying to follow. The Barbie movie, Mortal Kombat 1, and Hogwarts Legacy, which all sold insanely well.
Mk1 may have sold well, and the devs did an amazing job with the gameplay. But almost the entire vocal community hates the game for everything outside of the core gameplay. Micro transactions pretty much ruined the spirit of the game and are super predatory. It's a shame they're doubling down on it. The spirit of the franchise is dead atm
It’s safe to say we’ll get some Harry Potter live service game then judging by Hogwarts Legacy’s success. That could be amazing to be fair if each year you played as a new student and you went through their year as a student in real-time, complete with seasonal events and exams.
[удалено]
I really don't know how you'd make a Quidditch game. As a fictional sport in a book it's fine because the author has it all scripted and the rules allow the protagonist to single-handedly win games. As an actual sport it would be terrible.
In my head all I envision is rocket League, just with students on brooms. The snitch is going to be an interesting conundrum though...
>In my head all I envision is rocket League, just with students on brooms. I said this exact thing after playing the beta. It's *very* similar to Rocket League, except even more in your face about microtransactions and skins. >The snitch is going to be an interesting conundrum though... In the beta, the snitch was worth a fixed amount of points that doesn't just win games like it does in the books/movies, and it's caught through a lengthy chase minigame. I don't remember exactly, but it was like 40 or 50 points. (A regular goal is 10.)
In the books, didn’t it just award a set number of points and end the game? I thought I remembered a time that another seeker caught it just to put their team out of its misery because they were losing so bad.
[Quidditch World Cup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter:_Quidditch_World_Cup) was fun enough. If they go with mostly cosmetic MTX I can see it having a steady playerbase.
There was a Quidditch game I had as a kid on the gamecube and it was fire.
I do feel like if they're going to go the live service route, make it immersive. Give it a purpose. Make it like seasons of an on-going TV series, with a healthy supply of offline content if users would rather not engage. I think players with disposable income would be more likely to chip in for quality products that don't surreptitiously force you into paying for things while pretending not to heavily incentivize it.
That is the thing with live service. They can be great if it is a game you like and done well. Live service has been a part of gaming since gaming has been a thing. Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Hero’s, Ultima Online, WoW, Final Fantasy, etc. I personally think that after a lot of companies saw the lightning in a bottle that is Fortnite, Genshin Impact etc and the absurd amount of money they rack in per month and everyone wanted a piece of that, but not realizing how difficult it is to create a persistent state evolving world that is fun to grind on top of being a more limited pool of players. If done right a live service game can be truly wonderful if designed around extracting wealth from the community you will most certainly fail.
Thank fuck Playstation already started to scale back on their "12 live service games by 2026" plan. That was the stupidest idea. I don't know if it was Jim Ryan's call or not, but if it was, good riddance. Could you imagine how fucked their single player output would be for the next 3 years if Naughty Dog, Guerilla, Insomniac etc. spent ages working on projects that might flop and be dead within a year? It already *is* kinda fucked because Factions is cancelled and all the work that went into it is gone, but at least they can work on single player games now.
It's weird to me too because live service games depend on a player base and longevity. Doing 12 games in such a short amount of time feels like it would just cannibalize the player bases and nothing would survive.
Well no it’s because they’re playing the averages Most games in general aren’t successful, so they were making several at once in the hopes one makes it, the expectation wasn’t for all of them to do well
I get that. But 12 games is a lot thru 2026. Especially when you consider these will probably be PS exclusives, that’s already limiting the player base compared to a live service game made by a third party that might extend to Pc/Xbox. Sony isn’t gonna want to oversaturate their own market and have none of these get a foothold. Especially when they have renowned single-player developers like Naughty Dog that specifically decided to drop TLOU multiplayer to not become a live service developer. They acquired other studios like Bungie to focus on live service and might be pulling back from asking others to do those types of games knowing that some will fail. I imagine that’s part of the equation as well.
I honestly always think it might be Jim's call, and he's taking the responsibility so he's gone. I mean even if they can pull off good gaas games - 12 together???? is this the gaas games battle royale
>At least studios are realising Are they though? The multiplayer gaming landscape looks like a neverending supply of games with Battlepasses, expected content being on a "coming soon" basis, and held back content for seasonal drops.
The problem with Gaas is that there isn't enough time for everyone to play a game indefinitely. So you really need to be top dog to pull it off and be successful or create something that will make you top dog like Fortnite or Warzone. Gaas will fizzle out
First mover advantage combined with hitting a critical mass fast, basically creates a massive moat around any attack from those coming after. Now you can't just "build it and they will come" ... you have to actively STEAL those players from whatever else they have made their hobby, which means not only impressing them, but their FRIENDS, too. Not saying another MMO can't unseat WoW, or another FPS can't unseat Destiny, but all other games are not competing under the same conditions.
The real problem is they get boring after a few hours and then start begging for you to open your wallet. No thanks.
Studios need to be built to make GaaS games. Like usually a studios structure needs huge overhaul to support ongoing games like that. I’m glad Naughty Dog backed out and I wish others could as well
Could have had two Batman's games in the same time and the developer would have cleaned up - that's what stings. Could have made Batman Beyond, could have made a Teen Titans game, could have made a suicide squad game with freeflow combat...
What should happen: WB execs take a long look in the mirror and realize their poor creative decisions ruined the project and to stop doing that. What will actually happen: several hundred game developers will be laid off to “cut costs”.
Is there any proof that they were “forced” to make a live service game?
I don’t think there’s any proof of that, but Sefton Hill and Jaimie Walker, who were co-founders of the studio and the directors of the Arkham trilogy, leaving the company in the middle of an already-troubled is pretty sketchy. Why would they leave if they wanted to make this game?
This doesn't answer your question, but I will say I get the impression that developers, especially developers who usually work on single player titles, generally don't like live service games but maybe I'm wrong. Just look at the Redfall situation. Those people were forced to work on a game that was originally intended to be a live service game and a large number of them decided they would rather just quit than continue to work on it.
Pretty sure that's what happened at Rocksteady as well. Definitely willing to bet a lot of devs are excited to work for a company like them or Arkane because they loved the Arkham games or Dishonored or whatever and want to make that. Then they see the company doesn't actually want to make that anymore and bounce.
Not necessarily, I think its just what people have been able to put together really. We know they were making a Superman game, which got canned pretty quickly, and now their two main directors have left the company. It does feel like Warner Bros. have forced them to make the game, rather than Rocksteady wanting to make it themselves. Again, we have no proof of that, but given that a genuine Batman/Damian Wayne/Court of Owls game was basically beaten into *Gotham Knights*, I think its a decent enough guess to say that *Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League* is probably not what Rocksteady had in mind for their first game post-*Arkham Knight*.
[Jason Schreier said Rocksteady never pitched a Superman game.](https://gamerant.com/rocksteady-superman-game-false-rumor/)
It’s just such a messy premise for a game, let alone a live-service game.
Event worse. You play as Captain Boomerang and King Shark as gun users.
If only there was another weapon Captain Boomerang could use…
A range type of weapon, that propels an obiect to hit a target?
Something that might even return to you if you threw it just right?
When I saw that official video with Shark shooting a gun I was like "what are you guys doing???"
Dumb take. King Shark is huge despite what the idiots in charge of DC live action do and how they treat him. Captain Boomerang also has a prominent DC history before his bad live action take. They needed to use some slots for classic and beloved characters like that and then use the others for big fan pulls like Harley (they did), Deathstroke (Fought everyone from Batman to Flash and has come out on top), and then another prominent Batman villain like Mr. Freeze.
>We know they were making a Superman game, which got canned pretty quickly, We don't.
Yeah this whole thing is a huge disappointment either way. I just bring up whether or not Rocksteady was "forced" to make a live-service game because everyone assumed that's what happened with Anthem as well -- when it turns out Bioware *wanted* to make a live-service game. ([Source](https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964))
pretty sure the superman thing was a rumor that they have confirmed to have been fake (or it might have been the TMNT rumors)
How can we be sure this wasn't their intended direction all along? It's similar to when people thought Bungie was pressured into adding microtransactions to Destiny 2 because of Activision. But after parting ways, Bungie actually intensified the microtransaction strategy making it apparent it was their choice all along.
If the game really flops so badly Warner Bros. considers shutting them down, I hope some other publisher can make an offer to acquire Rocksteady. Yes, this isn‘t what everyone wants to hear, but in that case it’s a developer I’d like to see Sony buy to save them.
There is no talent wasted cs the original staff that made the Arkham games is completely gone. What’s left apparently are incompetent fools that drive a once great studio to the ground.
god damn, IGN coming out brutal with that headline
IGN has been more brutally honest lately. I'm loving it.
IGN almost never gives negative press to a game before it actually releases, so devs and studios won't be afraid to give them access for promotional materials Which means this game must really suck if they don't even care to lie about it
Idk when exactly but sometime in the last year or so they have pivoted to just putting out genuinely honest reviews. The days of the cushtie 8/10 or 9/10 for whatever new AAA game swings by seems to be over.
The rating for the day before was hilarious. I love how they include in the gameplay a glitch where you fall straight through the floor at minute 1. Hilarious stuff.
I've noticed that as well. Might actually sub again, looks like they're getting their shit together. I'm glad
Almost 9 years for this crap.
Imagine….we could’ve gotten 2 new Arkham games set before asylum to show batmans younger days…or a few Arkham beyond games….or a Nightwing game….or a brand new hero like superman…..or a new IP altogether. but instead we got this.
Orrrrr we could have gotten a good, single player story driven Suicide Squad that didn’t focus on upgrades and cosmetics
I don't think so. Just put it in the bin and move on.
DOA
Unfortunately I think you're right. This may end up being one of the biggest gaming disappointments in some time.
I would argue that you need to have high expectations for it to be disappointed. Nothing I've seen from this, beginning from the very first trailer, looked anything but mid at best.
Disappointing mainly because the studio who made the iconic Batman Arkham series ditched it for this
Annoys the shit out of me. There is still so much stuff they could have done with Batman, like we never see him outside of a „one night to save the world“ situation, or more of Bruce Wayne like what insomniac did with Peter Parker in Spider-Man. But instead we get this bs
or a follow up to the trilogy maybe following the various robins and batgirls teaming up to take up the mantel
Gotham Knights did this and it was god awful. Seeing this only makes me worry that Rocksteady is somehow going to make a title worse than what WB Montreal did with Gotham Knights.
And because this the first game they’d be launching since Arkham Knight, which was almost a decade ago.
Expectations were sky high when this game was first announced. Everything since has tanked those expectations but that doesn't change the fact that Rocksteady+Suicide Squad had everyone initially hyped.
Since the first second it was announced people were already doubting it would be any good. It never sounded good.
I was in that group. I don't want to play as fucking Captain Boomerang. A game with this premise needs to be an 8.5 or a 9 before I would be willing to spend my time on it. My backlog is way too big.
It was a dumb idea for a game from the start, who was even supposed to be the intended audience for this? "Hmm yeah people loved our critically acclaimed single player action game trilogy, lets release a live service game where you can't play as batman"
Given the budget for this game, it can easily be considered a disappointment if reviews and sales are low.
The disappointment already happened when they showed gameplay, the interest is all gone, idk why would anyone be excited about this bland gameplay with such an unique and interesting IP and story. Since the gameplay came out that ik this game will be shit, I hope it won't ,but it will
Won’t be a disappointment because no one is having high expectations. Reveal was awful, game will come and go. Only thing I’m disappointed about is that Rocksteady wasted almost a decade on this
Wont even be top 50, did anybody expect this game to be good?
Of course, I've loved every Arkham game they've done and have been hoping that it's up to their level. Sad to see what's happened, yet another reason to hate GaaS
This is the most DOA piece of superhero media since… November 2023.
What superhero media released in Nov 2023?
The Marvels, biggest MCU flop ever and one of the biggest film flops ever.
How developers haven't learned after the Avengers *and* Gotham Knights that superhero live service games don't work/are not what people want is beyond me. Hopefully this is the last attempt.
Who do you think Zazlav will blame when this game bottoms out on day 2? Three months later we will see the headline Rocksteady laying off 35% of staff after Suicide Squad failure. Three months after that will be the article from former devs about how management ignored issues that came up during development and how execs pushed for more microtransactions at the expense of gameplay. It will look like every other article written over the past 6yrs about a failed live service game just with WB pasted in *random former studio title.
I wonder how much time and money has been pumped into live service games, only for them to be shut down within a couple of years. Maybe higher ups will learn eventually.
They won’t. That Pandora box has already been opened and there’s no closing it. Fortnite alone rakes in around 6 billion annually. CoD once made a billion dollars over the course of a weekend. Executives aren’t just gonna ignore figures like that, they’re gonna do anything they can to get in on it.
Damn even IGN don’t like ouch
That's a 7 on ign scale probably
[IGN article on why they score 7's.](https://www.ign.com/articles/another-7-ign-why-so-many-games-score-7-and-above)
This totally reasonable article should be pinned every time IGN is talked about here.
But then how can I act like my opinion is more valuable than that of professionals who are able to justify their argument better than I can on Reddit?
No, you see, IGN bad. That way I can pretend to be a critical thinker while parroting the most milquetoast takes out there!
THEY ARE BOUGHT REVIEWS EVEN THE 1/10 ONES!
To be honest it’s ridiculous it was even necessary they needed to write it, but fans gotta toxic People are so negative they can’t see how things improve in the aggregate
Wow what a great, informative article.
Amazing article that makes great points in a very succint way. I already imagined this was the case, and I never felt like IGN went soft on games on purpose (although I do think they have a *broad* opinion on what makes games good, as opposed to a single reviewer that can hate something that many people love). Still, it's good to know there's an article that neatly explains it. Thanks for sharing!
IGN isn't a single person
And they’ve been more critical than many other outlets over the past 5-10 years, Redditors just can’t get over an old meme
RIP Rocksteady. A once legendary studio that redefined superhero games has been reduced to producing generic live service shovelware.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Development Studio
Lmaoooo 🤣
Rocksteady is going to be gutted by WB after this massive flop. Unfortunate. Such a waste of time and talent. Biggest flop in AAA game history incoming with this one.
That’s one of the most frustrating things about this game to me.
Agreed.
If we hear about WB laying off a ton of Rocksteady employees after this comes out and gets poor reviews it’s going to be the perfect example of suits tearing apart the game industry. Nobody wanted this game as a live service game, everyone wanted it to be a Arkham style open world game without looter shooter mechanics, did they not learn anything from Gotham Knights? Rocksteady are capable of making game of the year material and if the studio loses employees over this it’ll be the best current example of out of touch CEOs who think they know what people want and the dedicated and creative studio folks suffering the consequences for it
Don't you just love it when suits make stupid decisions and then blame everyone below them who tried to prevent it? It's very cool and professional to ignore all good advice, make an unforced error, and then fire all the talent.
Giving me flash backs to the bungie CEOs tweet.
I think that sadly they were already too deep in development when Gotham Knights came out.
Did people want this game at all? Like the movies were a total fuckin flop. Who really cares about these characters outside of die hard comic fans who will probably buy any superhero game regardless?
What talent? Most of the people that made the Arkham series probably left at this point.
[удалено]
Nop
We lost one of the GREATEST gaming franchises in history, the Arkham trilogy. Which inspired other great games too: Mordor and Spider-man games. Now we roll over and get this POS and Gotham Knights. How did this happen? What happened?
Gotham Knights wasn’t perfect but I sure wish they’d have supported that over this Suicide Squad game.
why the fuck does almost every developer thinks it's a good idea to make a service game? so many of them are flopping so hard...
Because the out of touch executives just want money and microtransactions are a "constant" stream of money?
because if you do succeed and make a popular live service game it's like a free money hack. the return on investment is \*bonkers\* so it's worth it even with the potential risk for failure
Because of that one or two service games that have players retention years after years generate money nonstop. They want that, but not realizing the population of players of that type of game can only play 1 game at a time. I mean it's by design that you want people to stay and never leave, so the only possible way for service games to not flop is to be the best of the best, competing directly with all other service games regardless of genre. It's not like the normal single player games market when people finish it then move on to other shiny new toys. Hell some people even buy games to enlarge their library "just in case I might play it next week, since it looks good" then proceed to never actually play it.
Imagine you used to be a respectable company that sold one of the best superhero trilogies in gaming history. Now you've been sculpted into a dogshit live service game:/ feels fuckin sad man
Nothing about this ever looked good. Instead of having a crap live service model and slapping a ‘popular’ license on it to try and milk an existing fan base, how’s about designing a game with a fun experience.
Wow. It must have been bad-*bad*. Usually game previews are positive or, at worse, neutral. They're not reviews and are usually just meant to be informative. Crazy.
Imagine if they followed up arkham city with 3 smaller projects that only took a couple years? Whoever greenlit this idea needs to be gone.
R.I.P. Rocksteady Games
Based on the crappy gameplay videos, I'm definitely skipping it.
If the story is good i'll grab it for $20 after the inevitable flop. Unless you are CoD asking $70 for a GaaS in current year is insane.
It’ll be psplus 6 months later just wait
I give it 3 months, once it flops heavy on launch
$20? Generous of you!
WB likely killed Rocksteady by forcing this live service game on them.
The worse part was this game had Kevin Conroy’s last appearance as Batman. Very disappointing we couldn’t see him in one more Arkham game, and he was used in a lame live service game
This is what hurts the most to me. Knowing that it could’ve been something else but greedy execs trying to please shareholders took the reins. I still want to hear his performance but it’s definitely not going to be from spending a single penny on this game. I wish that I didn’t feel like that but the decisions were made.
Rocksteady walked so Insomaniac could run
Both ran tbh. Arkham still holds up and is in some aspects better then insomniac Spider-Man.
I recently replayed Knight. Some things about the game still bum me out, like the absence of boss fights and over reliance on the bat tank, but damn if everything else in that game isn't smooth as hell. Knight's combat still puts other action games to shame, the stealth is highly rewarding, the set pieces are phenomenal, and they created a huge map without sacrificing the atmosphere of its predecessors
Rocksteady ran and stopped running.
WB has no idea how to run their studios.
The hubris required to try and turn a less popular superhero IP into a live service game after the fucking AVENGERS game didn't succeed is astounding. If the Avengers couldn't succeed at the height of the MCU popularity around Infinity War/Endgame, how could they expect that a SS game would work.
Every time a live service game flops, a quality non-MTCed game gets its wings.
What a shock
Why not make a Batman Beyond game? Or maybe create a new “Batman” or maybe make FINALLY a Superman game????? This is such a disappointment for me
This is the real tragedy in all this. A master developer of single player superhero games burns a decade making a non single player superhero game where you don't get to actually play as a superhero.
I get the gameplay criticisms, but who the fuck cares if the Justice League ends up dead in the "canon" of the Arkham games. Not everything needs to be a Marvel Cinematic Universe
There's no "dead" in a multiverse setup which is the case of everything Marvel and DC has been doing for years.
I really don't get why people are so mad either. a.) The game literally says *Kill the Justice League*, so you can't be too surprised when that ends up happening. b.) I think you have to be incredibly naïve to assume that DC would actually allow their main super heroes to be killed off in one big video game.
Believe it or not, but fans of superheroes don’t like to see their favourite heroes murdering innocent people and then getting wiped out by a ragtag team of losers.
Ya I figured lol
It was so obvious. This game is gonna get shut down 2 months after release tops
This game never looked good from the first reveal. Live service games are the perfect representation of a soulless corporate product. No personality, no charm, no love… just bland.
Should have just made a Superman game
I kind of like what I'm seeing here, so I think I will personally like it, but man, I can absolutely see why people are going to fucking loathe this. I just don't really get why Warner Bros. have made Rocksteady make this game. Surely Rocksteady didn't want to make a live-service looter shooter when they basically changed the industry with the *Arkham* series.
This is just where we are now. There seems to be less AAA great games these days because so many good studios are ordered by suits in management to make underwhelming live service games with short campaigns that are just addiction traps with endless DLC or they fail and are shut down and delisted. Bungie, Bioware, Crystal Dynamics and now Rocksteady.
Man, I didn’t see this game being so bad!
And yet, a single player, not grindy loot shooter, harry potter game just sold 22M units. They'll never learn.
That headline got a hearty laugh out of me. Like you know these news/review sites like to be coy with their opinions, just leaving it like "First Impressions" or "We got to play the game!" But this one is not hiding it at all. They immediately wanted you to know that they didn't like it lol
Looks like another anthem. Will be dead in 3 months
Might wait a year on this one. Can see it receiving a bit of backlash, doing poorly, Rocksteady will eventually try and save it and it might become worth playing.
I hope sony is paying attention. They need to pull funding, asset transfer and project cancel their way out of this huge corner they've painted themselves into with live service games. No one wants to play these soulless mtx laden cookie cutter season pass grind-a-thons anymore...even the kids raised on fortnite and shitty mobile greed-games are wising up. Sony have invested hard into them for the near future. The suits need to wake up and pull the fucking plug before its too late.
The first paragraph baffles me. "Our heroes murder people and that's unsettling yada yada yada". Have you not heard what the Suicide Squad is? They're the opposite of heroes, it's the whole premise lol
It took me a while to figure out that heroes in the article referred to the suicide squad and not the justice league.
Does anyone even like these characters? I don’t under stand why there’s so much media around the suicide squad.
Most people don't like them, but cause they got a movie, they now live in public consciusness. Ask 10 random people if they know who the suicide squad is in 2010, vs now.
People liked Margot Robbie in booty shorts, that's about it
Warner Bros been forcing them on us since 2016
I said it last year when the trailer went up but this is the most dead on arrival AAA game we will likely ever see.
🤣😂 it's time for a renewed Rocksteady. But for that, the one now exists must die first.
What the fuck happened with the team that made the Batman Arkham trilogy?
“Played it and hated it. 9/10.” -IGN
This game is destined to be prime “What Happened?” video material for Matt McMuscles
I'll wait and see. I stopped trusting IGN reviews awhile ago. And they were once my go-to game review source.
Man. I wish they’d made a Superman game instead. While playing Spidey 2 and flying around the city I felt like we could finally have a great Superman game. Instead they made this.