I have a couple of very vague memories of playing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League back when it released a couple of years ago. Mostly, I remember thinking ‘meh’. Some of the action was quite fun—although it quickly lost its charm—I didn’t mesh with any of the characters and their hit-and-miss humour, but its worst feature was undoubtedly that it was just so desperate to be played.
That may seem like a attribute to pick out, but from the get go it was painfully obvious that the Suicide Squad game had been concocted by a bunch of suits with the sole intention of being replayable and earning stacks of cash. Something that, to no one’s surprise, was later confirmed by the devs at Rocksteady after the dust settled on its release, as it was revealed that the botched game cost Warner Bros. $200 million.
Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong, two devs who worked on Suicide Squad retold this same story again in a recent interview with Bloomberg, and boy does that development sound like hell.
“There was definitely a sense when we first moved on to it—arrogance is the wrong word, but a confidence,” Armstrong says. “We’re coming back off hit after hit. Of course we’ll be able to do this.” But then came the slew of delays, which racked up the cost and the pressure for the game to make its money back.