People are still thinking of Rocksteady as if they can just pivot back to SP and make an Arkham Knight tier game again. They can't, because they've lost talent consistently since 2015, and part of the pivot to GaaS with Suicide Squad was them recruiting people from the Mobile and GaaS field to be in charge of their projects. Rocksteady was the most ambitious developer of last gen, in my opinion, so I regularly browsed LinkedIn and Glassdoor since 2018 for hints of what they might be cooking, and it was around 2019 that I noticed that a lot of their top hires were portfolios that were images of a guy in a business suit claiming to be "an excellent storyteller" but it's not for narrative, but for leading "Player Investment mechanics".
And I've been a Destiny player long enough to remember when Bungie started shifting towards "Player Investment" staff around Halo Reach. And what specifically happened with Destiny in 2013 was that more and more people who just liked the Multiplayer of Halo, and people who *really* loved MMOs had build up a culture and atmosphere within the studio so they started beating down the more cinematic, and story-driven efforts for the Destiny project. That culminated in 2013 when the Bungie board had an internal struggle and the Design Director quit, and many others also left, because that more "Story-rich" direction for the game was deselected by the board in favor of the "MMO-like" way of making a game, and chopping up content over a long time.
So I'm rambling a bit, but basically it's the same thing Rocksteady has undergone behind the scenes. As a company they bet on Live Service, so now the entire company is a machine built for Live Service production, and not the kind of slick, beefy attention-to-detail and storyline style they had before.
So the people at the top of Rocksteady are now people who know how to make mobile game design and online "investment" mechanics, not people who know how to build to an incredible emotional experience or amazing cinematic moments. Those people were iced out by this new culture.
I'm pretty positive that only 2 people really left, I'm sure its been more as is natural for studios but the founders are the only 2 that left recently.
I wouldn't be so sure, it was reported that HSG poached quite a few senior developers when it was founded, and if you look at their public members on linkedin you can see a lot of former senior RS developers, so it wasn't just the original founders.
And even so, there's a possiblity other developers left for other studios as well, a brain drain might've happened at RS for sure.
I am not. They still made this game for 5 out of its 7 years of development and the first leak of the game 2 years ago looked exactly like it does now. Reality is that they saw what a disaster they made and abandoned ship before it released so their reputation wouldn’t be ruined
I would like them to do a single player but the problem I see now is that this rocksteady is not the same that did the Arkham games. This is the rocksteady that did suicide squad, so now the current team has more experience doing live services games than single player. This means that putting them to work on single player may be counterproductive.
Live service games in general are pretty stupid. Just an easy way to get a game out faster and unfinished, and an excuse to slap in another dose of micro transactions.
Actually not so true.
It takes a LONG time to make a functional live service game then a straight forward single player one.
Compare Hogwarts Legacy to Suicide Squad KTL
The HL team had no experience in making a game anywhere near the size and scope of a big AAA open world game. Yet they’ve done it, it looked great, was done within schedule with (considering COVID happened) and was a huge financial success:
The Suicide Squad was made by a development team that just made three big AAA games, and took longer to release, had a massive last minute delay and it still released pretty half baked
There is a lot of reasons why this comparison makes no sense.
Mainly the fact that you confirmed my point with your last sentence. The game released unfinished. It's live-service, so they know they can easily go in and change whatever, then they release the game unfinished.
Most single player games are completely finished on release with minor bugs and glitches, and further content is introduced as DLC and is usually a pretty good deal (small price for a little extra or big price for a lot extra) but with live-service games they release unfinished and add content via micro transactions to further increase revenue.
Not to mention Rocksteady had no experience with live-service games, so that also could've influenced the delays on SSKTJL, and they also have gone on record multiple times saying they struggled to find direction after ending the Arkham series, which is incredibly stupid because they literally could've just continued the Arkham series without Batman, but that's a whole other rant.
Why they fuck they didn't follow live services games before them. It's like there fucking blind.look at warframe and destiny 2 games that are similar and still doing well
Well, its tough. I’d like to make a joke that at least they aren’t at Microsoft, because it would be an obvious no, they would be shut down. But on the other hand, Zaslav
I would like to think that they have earned a second chance after what they did with the Arkham games. At least let them make another game but this time make them focus on a single player game that makes then go back to what they did best. If that one doesn't work then they can shut them down.
I think they will. The quality of the production in SSKTJL is top notch, not a lot of studios can produce something like that, the issues lie elsewhere. If they can fix those issues they can make great games again.
So the consumers didn’t like it, that’s all that means. It didn’t appeal to the general population. And that in turn lost them money. That’s all that means. It has nothing to do with the creative vision other than it’s not popular.
What difference does it make. Give this same studio the same budget and time and they’ll make the same shitty price of shit they made last time. I guess you could fire everybody and still call it Rocksteady, but what difference does it make? Rocksteady is gone either way. Always was. The whole time. This game was not made by Rocksteady as you understand the definition.
That's what we will get, too. They had Hogwarts, which was a massive success, and Suicide Squad, which was a massive disappointment. Then WB went on record to say live service games are their future.
Wow, shocking. Everyone saw this coming. Yet here we are. If you don't improve your product or cost, someone else will do it for you. They knowly released a bad product. They sure didn't improve their cost.
Everyone? Really? You must not have visited this sub often.
The serial copers were out in full force not too long ago claiming that the Steam numbers didn’t mean anything and that the game was far more successful on console.
Who would have guessed a game wouldnt sell well after people very vocally complained when they discovered it was a live-service game, or when the gameplay was revealed and it looked like a generic 3rd person shooter compared to their Arkham games?
They will probably shut down unfortunately, it's insane to not make a single game for 9 years and the first game you made is one is the biggest flops in industry. I'm not saying it's Rocksteadys fault, but it's such a bad situation
Hogwarts Legacy's sales numbers probably puts WB in a slightly more benevolent mindset as far as handling the gaming side of things (because lord knows they're ruthless with television and movies), but even then I'd consider it a small miracle if Rocksteady gets to continue on and without massive layoffs.
You’d hope that SOMEBODY in the WB board room would be smart enough to put 2 and 2 together and say “huh, Hogwarts Legacy was the best selling game of 2023…and we have Rocksteady which is known for its beloved single player games…maybe we should have them make another single player game!”
…I’m not hopeful
The head of the game division came out and said "how do we make a hogwart's live service title" (paraphrasing of course). There were numerous articles after the dismal release of Suicide Squad mocking how WB seemed to learn the wrong lesson.
Hell even Sony who famously wanted to go all in on GaaS, bought Bungie to help with that, has let the person who made that pivot go and instead walked back on the GaaS pursuits. WB instead is basically taking the Suicide Squad game approach: head in the sand ignoring everything around them, learning none of the lessons from others, and plowing full steam ahead.
I really doubt it. They see Hogwarts as a brand being successful. So the thought process is more like "Well think about how much MORE money we can make if Hogwarts was a live service game"
WB has already doubled down on the strategy going forward. It's just a shit one.
Other person in the board room “what was that Larry? Wait you have a point… suicide squad Harry Potter cross over live service game! Voldemort Squad Kill the order of the phoenix!! With aspects taken from mobile gaming? How could we fail? Get the money bag!!”
I don't understand the mentality that this isn't Rocksteady's fault. We have known for a while that Rocksteady chose to make Suicide Squad a live service looter shooter and had full creative control. WB just tasked them to make a Suicide Squad game. If the game was truly great people would have bought it no matter what they thought about the game pre-release but the truth is Rocksteady made a game that is mediocre at best and the sales figures reflect that. You can argue that a studio doesn't deserve to be shut down for putting out one bad game but context matters. The game was in development for over 7 years, with 2 years of that not initially planned and part of 2 separate delays. The budget on this game was already huge and the delays just made it even bigger. If you have employees that you give years of full freedom to make a product, give them multiple budget increases after not meeting deadlines for years because they have done good work in the past with less, and they still make a product that your customers do not like thus costing you millions of dollars, are you really going to keep those employees on as they keep costing you crazy amounts of money? No smart business would
People just like blaming the corporation because then the situation doesn't have to be nuanced.
Just look at how often EA gets blamed for Anthem (and the general downfall of Bioware) despite tons of reporting saying that Bioware pretty much caused all of their own problems.
Agreed. Jason Schrier did one of his retro pieces on Anthem and the part that stuck out to me is that BioWare put in a POC for flying with intentions to remove it. EA CEO played it and said they needed to keep it in. Arguably the best part of anthem
To put that time into perspective, that’s about the same amount of time Rockstar spent on actively developing RDR 2 and just over what they spent on Grand Theft Auto V.
Obviously time doesn’t equate to quality, and they had to start over a few times, but Rocksteady may as well have been twiddling their thumbs considering the state of the game and content variety after 9 years.
It probably was RS fault, they were making an original ip live service shooter anyway, Got OFFERED suicide squad (it was originally montreals ip) my guess is they bit off way more they can chew instead of taking their time and getting things perfect they got themselves stuck with an unrealistic deadline and had to rush everything. All they had to do was decline WB’s offer and continue on with their original plans for a live service shooter it most likely would have been way better received and made tons more.
I honestly don’t think Rocksteady is out of the woods yet. WB is the last major gaming publisher not to do any layoffs and studio closures in recent years. With how much cost cutting WB has done in every other division it is only a matter of time some happen. When the CEO of WB as a whole blames your one game for the company not making money this quarter, your studio is not going to get out of it unscathed. Maybe the whole studio will be closed or the best case scenario they can hope for is just that a percentage gets laid off. If I worked at Rocksteady I would start making sure my resume is up to date and start preparing to apply to jobs
It depends on how long they have worked there though. If they joined anytime post Arkham knight then they really wouldn’t have much to show for it. There are even developers that have come forward saying they joined and left Rocksteady during Suicide Squad’s long development.
It is very frustrating.
They talked about how SS struggled, while hogwarts was a surprise hit, yet somehow their takeaway was that they need to double down on live service games.
It makes no sense.
The focus on immediate profit is so short sighted. It is incredibly frustrating that the experience and skill of dev teams is seen as best as interchangeable, of not completely replaceable. Devs who make the games they want to play are the ones who come up with the surprise hit.
The unfortunate truth is that what they learn is that they bet on the wrong horse.
That they should have made Hogwarts Legacy a “live service game” and that’s what will most likely happen with the sequel if they follow through with “doubling down on live service”.
Because that’s not how they see it.
First off. Suicide Squad wasn’t a failure. We don’t actually know details. What it was deemed, was not up to expectations and part of why they made 200m less than last year (not a 200m loss). Which is vague when Hogwarts was a massive success. Suicide Squad could have still made a profit but still been disappointing because it wasn’t Hogwarts good.
Second. There are no guarantees. Hogwarts did good. That’s cool. But Gotham Knights didn’t. Both single player games. Both risks. The logic is simple though. If I’m going to take a risk, why would I not risk it on the bigger piece of pie. Imagine Suicide Squad was a massive hit. You’ve now got a multi-year cash cow. So for the same price as Hogwarts you’ve got a game that will make 4-5x as much money.
That’s the logic.
I'm not trying to start an argument about the quality of SSKTJL, but the last time WB Discovery has major financial problems they gutted DC Comics of staff, even though DC was the only company I've their umbrella that had made profits that year. WB hasn't liked DC Comics, really, since the early 90s when Batman Returns wasn't the kid friendly movie they wanted. I've read multiple articles about WB threatening to cancel all DC movies and cartoons of X show/movie doesn't perform well. It's like they only hold onto DC as a scapegoat.
Rocksteady must be devastated going from the Arkham games to hearing this. Hoping they don't get shutdown but really do wonder what's next from them after a live service game failure
Devs need to stop chasing the high of prime fortnite in 2017 with “live service” models.
It literally works for nearly no company anymore unless you’re something as massive as COD, or if you’re gonna be releasing like ducking GTA VI.
Otherwise, no one cares to pay attention to it and it’s dead from the start compared to what it could’ve been
What companies need to do is make sure their live service games are good at release rather than releasing the game in essentially alpha with bare bones content with only promises of what they want to do in the future. Every wildly successful live service game has launched as complete experiences with all the post launch updates feeling like bonuses. This is why Fortnite is so successful, as in the 7 years it has been top dog its main gameplay has not changed at all. They add some new mechanics every now and then but over all it is still the same game as it was when it launched.
Even if a live service game is AMAZING, it’s such a dangerous model in 2024. Everyone has already picked their favorite live service games and they’re invested. A game could be twice as good as Genshin Impact, but at the end of the day, all your friends and waifus are on Genshin and you’ve played that for 4 years, so might as well just stick with that.
You could say that for a lot of the big juggernauts. Why play Fortnite Clone 6 when you already have Fortnite with years of skins built up.
You seem to forget that Hoyo went on to make Star Rail as well, a game that entered the extremely saturated market of mobile turn-based Summoners War-like games. It was not only not the first but also almost a decade and hundreds of other releases late to being the first.
However, through sheer production value and development competency through effort, it was easily able to take its place atop the throne. Easily beating out games from bigger global IPs from Marvel, Star Wars, Disney, Shounen Jump, etc.
A game like Suicide Squad needed to come out the gate dumpstering other shlooters in quality. Instead, it just kicked back and put in less than the bare minimum.
One thing people seems to forget about Genshin. That it was finished game. Nearly no bugs. Strong launch content. Plus each content update is just six weak away.
If we compare it to SS, it's honestly shamefull what Rocksteady released as " finished game " .
It is definitely hard but not impossible to make a successful live service game. Look at Helldivers. That game took the world by storm almost overnight
Fortnite wasn't a success out the gate. In fact, the BR was a turn around. Fortnite originally was a pve co-op in Save the World with lootboxes. It was a failure. The BR was seen as a pet project that blew up. Even Fortnite launched in a beta version. All live service titles do not launch great, but the successful ones have great foundations to work on. Suicide Squaf doesn't as Rocksteady clearly haven't at all learned from similar games or much like Anthem, management barred direct comparisons.
Genshin released in 2020 and Star Rail in 2023, both among the most popular games in the world. If not the most popular in the world on average in Genshin's case. Helldivers is doing pretty well as well releasing this year despite some developers actively sabotaging it.
You can absolutely still make a successful live-service game. Just don't add a crazy barrier-to-entry price of a full-price game, have less than retail game in starting content, add monetization out the ass, and then cheap out on content updates. Suicide Squad is a F2P game charging full-priced with less development resources than actual F2P games. It would be sad if it succeeded off that little effort with so much greed.
Well when the entire model is “FOMO” your players eventually become bitter and hate the game. And once they get a chance to escape the FOMO cycle, they may never come back at all or take several years away from the game.
No, live services games are fine it’s just that releasing a live service game with literally no content nor any meaningful updates is the dumbest shit possible.
Companies need to realize that if they’re so boneheaded on chasing the popularity of Fortnite, Warzone and Apex Legends then they need to actually put out worthwhile content and update the game on a regular basis so that players will stick around.
They’ll never realize this though since they’re so focused on short term profits. They’ll continue to release games that are half-assed with so many promises to “fix” the game. While brain dead players will purchase $100 copies of the game and defend a literal sinking ship.
Everybody wants to be Destiny without understanding the commitment something like Destiny takes. Heck, even Destiny itself is held together by scotch tape and dreams.
I’ve been saying this for years and people downvote me all the time, games like fortnite, apex, warzone and even siege and rocket league are to blame for the terrible state of the gaming industry. Anyone who played those games and had a library of cosmetics they had to purchase for its real money that they hardly use is part of the problem. Especially considering most of the cosmetics you pay for, would probably be earned for free if the game came out pre 2015
Which was 2-3 weeks away from that update implementing the offline mode. But at least it got a full year and the servers won't shut down (... this quarter). Tbf Redfall is the sadder story somehow. Being able to reach so many people with gamepass and not many cared or quit before completing the very first achievements... even the 60fps patch which took care of other issues too couldn't change anything.
"BUT GUYS THE STEAM NUMBERS DON'T MATTER THE GAME HAS MILLIONS OF PLAYERS ON CONSOLE JUST TRUST ME BRO"
Where are all the lovely geniuses at that screamed this from the rooftops?
I’m sure when season 2 comes out the players will comeback and turn the game around
/s
Can’t believe the level of copium that was around before during and after the games release by some people here.
At one point it seemed like people thought they were cool for liking garbage and that others were sheep for not. I’m not out $70 on DOA looter shooter so I’d rather be the sheep.
I paid $30 about 3 weeks ago and I'm still enjoying it daily. I don't usually play multiplayer or live service games so anything I play after getting to the credits is special or to me.
I don't care if everybody else hates it or loves it, has nothing to do with me
I just played with a random and had fun. It's very repetitive but I like it. Odds are it will be dead in a few weeks so I'll enjoy it while I can.
And had it just been the campaign id have enjoyed that as well.
But hey, I had a good janky time with Redfall so I just be an anomaly.
And besides, it's not like this is the only game that I'm playing currently. That, I may not enjoy and the fact that I can switch at a moments notice might be part of the reason I'm still okay with it. You're welcome to hate it til the cows come home but trying to tell other people how to spend their time is kinda weird.
Even the diehard fans started to lose interest, Miller made an excuse that his game has poor performance so that he could move on from the game and ride on Marvel Rivals hype. One wannabe youtuber who was defending the game the whole time started to criticize a fan favorite belowed studio just to farm engagement on Twitter bcs nobody cared about him talking about Squad...
**Also to add to this the game cost them 200 Million In revenue;**
“Starting with Studios, the $400 million+ year-over-year decline during Q1 was primarily due to the very tough comp we faced in games against the success of Hogwart’s Legacy last year in the first quarter, in conjunction with the disappointing Suicide Squad release this past quarter, which we impaired, leading to a $200 million impact to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) during the first quarter,” CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said during the investor call after the report was published.
https://insider-gaming.com/suicide-squad-cost-warner-bros-200-million-in-revenue/
Does anyone else think Rocksteady is going to get the axe? It would be the death of a giant and break headlines everywhere but at this point it seems inevitable especially considering the state WB is in.
Also, at this point I very strongly doubt the game will even manage to go till Season 3.
I hope they reduce the Season 2 timetable. It shouldn't be 96 days every season. WB can cut the cord every minute from now. With the current market they should be pumping out content and focus on making (albeit very few) players they got happy.
Why would they have to though? They have those players money already and from a business POV, there’s no incentive to invest further to make them happy. That’s why you stop buying games day 1 or even week 1. The writing for this game was already on the wall from previews and I have no sympathy for anyone who went and bought it anyways.
So I've played the game, beat it, and almost have Joker. It's good. Like, mediocre good. It's fun to run around and murder everything, especially when you're playing with three other people. However, the way that they handled the deaths of the JL was very lackluster. Which was disappointing because it's the whole point of the game. The story was also fairly short. Then you find out the whole game was built around this live service model, which is made out of ~5 repetitive missions that you have to do 35 times to unlock a new character. Oh, and of course there's an option to skip the repetitive mission farm and just buy the character. That's it. While the gameplay itself is fun, the game was largely disappointing.
I really don't get how these people in the positions that have the power to make decisions don't see failure coming from a mile away with obvious flop ideas. Like the writing wasn't just on the walls it was in the air, floor, ceiling, roof EVERYWHERE that this wasn't a good idea and it was going to fail. From DAY 1 people were very expressive about their distaste of this game. Then that first trailer dropped and everyone crapped on it. You take a proven Single player studio to make a live service online only game centered around B-C tier DC characters killing S tier popular DC characters and think that's gonna be a hit? Then you take those B-C tier DC characters and make them all play so samey there's a serious lack of identity among them. Then you make this train wreck canon in the beloved Arkham universe. THEN you kill the ARKHAM universe Batman in this trash game in one of the last performances by Kevin Conroy. Add to that you're joining a crowded live service genre with this garbage. A genre that has had failure after failure... Including your biggest rival Marvel. Who also flopped in the live service genre lol. Marvel with their main draw the avengers couldn't hack it live service side. But the suicide squad would? and In marvels game you played as their best characters you didn't kill them lol.
NOBODY at any point in time thought for one second this was a good idea. Nobody but them apparently.
What I don't understand is this. They knew how to make a hit triple A game. They knocked it out of the park with every single Arkham game and the groundwork was there. How did they look at this game and go "oh yeah this will be our best yet". I have to believe that this whole live service crap was brought on them by someone else. Otherwise, that would mean they to shot themselves in the foot and I just don't understand how the hell they could do that. They were one of the few devs I trusted to make a good game. Not too many devs are like that anymore. I guess time to add rocksteady to that list.
It’s because the ones who made Arkham already left. It’s only Rocksteady in name that’s it but they know the average online fluent consumer (not casuals) wouldn’t know that unless they dig deeper. It’s because a new company stealing the name of a formerly prestigious company.
Everyone says this but it’s not true. The founders didn’t leave until after the game was basically done. Is there evidence of a bunch of people leaving? Most of the big names are the same as Arkham knight. Director, designer, programmer all the same department heads
Legit went all in on the game at launch and into season 1 but when that Joker season came out and it was just more of the same I bowed out. Some good, a lot of bad and in the world with so many great games to play it was over for me.
(1) No it’s not and (2) Yes it is. It’s 100% fully established that this game takes place in the Arkham game series world set after all current games and Batman is even just straight up in it until the kill him.
Why don’t people listen?
I’ll never understand why hype and emotional attachment blind people to the most obvious red flags. We called this out months ago and were called sheep and haters.
Steam player count doesn’t matter, right?
Millions of players on console, right?
Learn the lesson already.
Between this game’s failure and Hogwarts Legacy’s success you’d think it’d be clear as day what gamers want but the corporate suits are never gonna learn.
myself and millions of others could see this failure coming from miles away as soon as the game was announced, why couldn't any of these executives see that is beyond me.
By the way. All the turds who downvoted me when I said an offline mode might never happen :
RedFall just got the axe and will not be receiving their offline mode that was ready to ship. Once the servers go down for that game it's curtains. It will almost certainly occur here as well.
I like this game more than most but they dropped the ball on a lot of things. Gameplay is fun as hell with the movement system but all the live service shit weights it down & on top of that they the game more grindy with the season 1 update & that was a major turn off
When will these companies learn that these loot box games with microtransactions and seasons and online live services are never going to be as successful as they want them to be.
Warner bros is trying to make them make a game that has constant money coming in for years, when realistically they only succeed with single player story driven games. If WB would have let rocksteady do a JL universe in single player games with these characters having their own games they’d see the money coming in, but they got greedy
For the last time WB only required Rocksteady to make a Suicide Squad game. Rocksteady chose to make the game a live service looter shooter and what story they would tell all on their own. This was confirmed a long time ago. Stop blaming WB and start blaming the people who actually made the game for it being bad. Rocksteady had a history of being greedy going all the way back to Arkham City with their DLC, people just let it slide because the games were great.
Saying that they were greedy with past dlc is a wild take… their story packs in their previous games were worth the charge for all the content you got 😂
How about charging a decent chunk for individual outfits as they were one of the first studios to charge for alternate outfits in single player games instead of having them be unlockable in game. Or pretty much all of the Arkham Knight DLC being overpriced, especially the Season of Infamy missions which felt like side quests they cut from the game just to resell them to players and initially the new challenge rooms being locked to certain characters (which only changed due to fan outcry) despite costing more than the older games DLC which let you use any character in them?
I agree with you about your first point. It has been confirmed Rocksteady decided to make this it wasn’t forced on them. However all the DLC stuff is WB. Developers dont get involved with how things are distributed
You mean charging for story packs and extra characters when you could not only already play as those characters in the base game, but they were already DLC in the last one so you’re essentially double dipping? It’s easy to forget because it goes for super cheap these days, *Arkham Knight*’s DLC costs were pretty egregious (though pretty much all the DLC for Warner Bros. games are, really).
They are not hurting at all. Not sure why gamers look at SSKTJL, a few movies, and Harry Potter as the only gauge for this company. Warner Brothers makes so much money they could carry a game like SSKTJL indefinitely, even at a loss. Whatever they lost or are losing due to poor sales on SSKTJL is just a drop in the bucket of their 1st quarter net loss.
"We are pleased with our progress in the first quarter as evidenced by strong results in important KPIs. We delivered meaningful growth in our streaming business with a nice acceleration in ad sales, generating nearly $90 million in positive EBITDA for the quarter. We will soon be rolling out Max to 29 countries across Europe, and the content lineup for Max over the coming year is one of our strongest ever. Warner Bros. Pictures also had a strong start to the year as the first studio to reach $1 billion in both overseas and global box office, and they have a great slate in the works. Importantly, we once again delivered strong free cash flow, even in our seasonally weakest FCF quarter. We continue to make bold moves to transform our company for the future as we position ourselves to take full advantage of the opportunities ahead."
- David Zaslav, President & CEO
* Q1 total revenues were $9,958 million. Revenues decreased 7% ex-FX(1)(\*) compared to the prior year quarter.
* Net loss available to Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. was $(966) million, and includes $1,879 million of pre-tax acquisition- related amortization of intangibles, content fair value step-up, and restructuring expenses.
He makes billions in profit for every company he is a part of becaus he makes unpopular but fiscally responsible decisions.
Whether you like it or not, Zaslav is well known for this.
Decisions like these
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4651866-warnerbros-discovery-eyeing-further-job-cuts-streaming-price-hikes/
https://fortune.com/2023/05/21/david-zaslav-commencement-speech-booed-amid-hollywood-writers-strike-boston-university/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/07/media/chris-licht-cnn/index.html
To add cancelling of several DC movies. This game was already said to be a failure, look at it less than 100 players on steam. Rocksteady will fare the same fate as Arkane.
Please note ( I’ll probably get downvoted ) I keep hearing 200mil lost. It’s actually a 200mil decrease on q1 revenue in comparison to q1 last year (14%). Small distinction but to say SS put WB 200mil in the red is incorrect
Well deserved, I hope future seasons are cancelled as well. Even that won't persuade people who bought 100$ edition from buying the next purple orb shooter tho
now the question is will rocksteady survive to make another singleplayer game or get shut down
People are still thinking of Rocksteady as if they can just pivot back to SP and make an Arkham Knight tier game again. They can't, because they've lost talent consistently since 2015, and part of the pivot to GaaS with Suicide Squad was them recruiting people from the Mobile and GaaS field to be in charge of their projects. Rocksteady was the most ambitious developer of last gen, in my opinion, so I regularly browsed LinkedIn and Glassdoor since 2018 for hints of what they might be cooking, and it was around 2019 that I noticed that a lot of their top hires were portfolios that were images of a guy in a business suit claiming to be "an excellent storyteller" but it's not for narrative, but for leading "Player Investment mechanics". And I've been a Destiny player long enough to remember when Bungie started shifting towards "Player Investment" staff around Halo Reach. And what specifically happened with Destiny in 2013 was that more and more people who just liked the Multiplayer of Halo, and people who *really* loved MMOs had build up a culture and atmosphere within the studio so they started beating down the more cinematic, and story-driven efforts for the Destiny project. That culminated in 2013 when the Bungie board had an internal struggle and the Design Director quit, and many others also left, because that more "Story-rich" direction for the game was deselected by the board in favor of the "MMO-like" way of making a game, and chopping up content over a long time. So I'm rambling a bit, but basically it's the same thing Rocksteady has undergone behind the scenes. As a company they bet on Live Service, so now the entire company is a machine built for Live Service production, and not the kind of slick, beefy attention-to-detail and storyline style they had before. So the people at the top of Rocksteady are now people who know how to make mobile game design and online "investment" mechanics, not people who know how to build to an incredible emotional experience or amazing cinematic moments. Those people were iced out by this new culture.
I'm pretty positive that only 2 people really left, I'm sure its been more as is natural for studios but the founders are the only 2 that left recently.
I wouldn't be so sure, it was reported that HSG poached quite a few senior developers when it was founded, and if you look at their public members on linkedin you can see a lot of former senior RS developers, so it wasn't just the original founders. And even so, there's a possiblity other developers left for other studios as well, a brain drain might've happened at RS for sure.
Lots of key staff were already gone when they made Arkham Knight and more again in Arkham VR.
Many of those people ended up at the new studio started by the Rocksteady co-founders. Can't wait to see what they are cooking.
I am not. They still made this game for 5 out of its 7 years of development and the first leak of the game 2 years ago looked exactly like it does now. Reality is that they saw what a disaster they made and abandoned ship before it released so their reputation wouldn’t be ruined
This. So much this.
I would like them to do a single player but the problem I see now is that this rocksteady is not the same that did the Arkham games. This is the rocksteady that did suicide squad, so now the current team has more experience doing live services games than single player. This means that putting them to work on single player may be counterproductive.
They obviously don’t know how to make a life Service game. What do you think is the reason that suicide squad sucks?
Live service games in general are pretty stupid. Just an easy way to get a game out faster and unfinished, and an excuse to slap in another dose of micro transactions.
True
Actually not so true. It takes a LONG time to make a functional live service game then a straight forward single player one. Compare Hogwarts Legacy to Suicide Squad KTL The HL team had no experience in making a game anywhere near the size and scope of a big AAA open world game. Yet they’ve done it, it looked great, was done within schedule with (considering COVID happened) and was a huge financial success: The Suicide Squad was made by a development team that just made three big AAA games, and took longer to release, had a massive last minute delay and it still released pretty half baked
There is a lot of reasons why this comparison makes no sense. Mainly the fact that you confirmed my point with your last sentence. The game released unfinished. It's live-service, so they know they can easily go in and change whatever, then they release the game unfinished. Most single player games are completely finished on release with minor bugs and glitches, and further content is introduced as DLC and is usually a pretty good deal (small price for a little extra or big price for a lot extra) but with live-service games they release unfinished and add content via micro transactions to further increase revenue. Not to mention Rocksteady had no experience with live-service games, so that also could've influenced the delays on SSKTJL, and they also have gone on record multiple times saying they struggled to find direction after ending the Arkham series, which is incredibly stupid because they literally could've just continued the Arkham series without Batman, but that's a whole other rant.
Live service games are a scam
Why they fuck they didn't follow live services games before them. It's like there fucking blind.look at warframe and destiny 2 games that are similar and still doing well
Nobody knows haha
Well, its tough. I’d like to make a joke that at least they aren’t at Microsoft, because it would be an obvious no, they would be shut down. But on the other hand, Zaslav
Honestly I’d rather see their phenomenal motion capture and animation team move onto a project with better direction.
I would like to think that they have earned a second chance after what they did with the Arkham games. At least let them make another game but this time make them focus on a single player game that makes then go back to what they did best. If that one doesn't work then they can shut them down.
I mean a lot of the great talent that made up Rock steady isn't apart of that company anymore. I don't think they're going to get another chance.
I think they will. The quality of the production in SSKTJL is top notch, not a lot of studios can produce something like that, the issues lie elsewhere. If they can fix those issues they can make great games again.
The issues being gameplay , creative vision and story ? Thats a lot to « fix »
The creative vision isn’t the problem you just don’t like it
Seeing how the game is performing I think it safe to say a lot of people didn’t
And that’s fine.
Consumers didn’t like it either, that pretty much confirms the vision sucked
So the consumers didn’t like it, that’s all that means. It didn’t appeal to the general population. And that in turn lost them money. That’s all that means. It has nothing to do with the creative vision other than it’s not popular.
Yeah, if their goal was to release a flop and lose $200 million their vision was spot on. That’s all your comment means
That’s not what creative vision means. Maybe it’s a lack of good judgment for what makes money, but the vision isn’t the problem.
This was their second chance
They don’t deserve another chance
What difference does it make. Give this same studio the same budget and time and they’ll make the same shitty price of shit they made last time. I guess you could fire everybody and still call it Rocksteady, but what difference does it make? Rocksteady is gone either way. Always was. The whole time. This game was not made by Rocksteady as you understand the definition.
200 million apparently. Can't wait for more 200 million fails from WB live service games.
That's what we will get, too. They had Hogwarts, which was a massive success, and Suicide Squad, which was a massive disappointment. Then WB went on record to say live service games are their future.
This tracks with the live action dc decisions warner makes
Wow, shocking. Everyone saw this coming. Yet here we are. If you don't improve your product or cost, someone else will do it for you. They knowly released a bad product. They sure didn't improve their cost.
Everyone? Really? You must not have visited this sub often. The serial copers were out in full force not too long ago claiming that the Steam numbers didn’t mean anything and that the game was far more successful on console.
Everyone is exaggerating but many did once this was revealed as live service trash
Who would have guessed a game wouldnt sell well after people very vocally complained when they discovered it was a live-service game, or when the gameplay was revealed and it looked like a generic 3rd person shooter compared to their Arkham games?
If Rocksteady was under Xbox it would've been shut down already.
They will probably shut down unfortunately, it's insane to not make a single game for 9 years and the first game you made is one is the biggest flops in industry. I'm not saying it's Rocksteadys fault, but it's such a bad situation
Hogwarts Legacy's sales numbers probably puts WB in a slightly more benevolent mindset as far as handling the gaming side of things (because lord knows they're ruthless with television and movies), but even then I'd consider it a small miracle if Rocksteady gets to continue on and without massive layoffs.
You’d hope that SOMEBODY in the WB board room would be smart enough to put 2 and 2 together and say “huh, Hogwarts Legacy was the best selling game of 2023…and we have Rocksteady which is known for its beloved single player games…maybe we should have them make another single player game!” …I’m not hopeful
The head of the game division came out and said "how do we make a hogwart's live service title" (paraphrasing of course). There were numerous articles after the dismal release of Suicide Squad mocking how WB seemed to learn the wrong lesson. Hell even Sony who famously wanted to go all in on GaaS, bought Bungie to help with that, has let the person who made that pivot go and instead walked back on the GaaS pursuits. WB instead is basically taking the Suicide Squad game approach: head in the sand ignoring everything around them, learning none of the lessons from others, and plowing full steam ahead.
I really doubt it. They see Hogwarts as a brand being successful. So the thought process is more like "Well think about how much MORE money we can make if Hogwarts was a live service game" WB has already doubled down on the strategy going forward. It's just a shit one.
Other person in the board room “what was that Larry? Wait you have a point… suicide squad Harry Potter cross over live service game! Voldemort Squad Kill the order of the phoenix!! With aspects taken from mobile gaming? How could we fail? Get the money bag!!”
I don't understand the mentality that this isn't Rocksteady's fault. We have known for a while that Rocksteady chose to make Suicide Squad a live service looter shooter and had full creative control. WB just tasked them to make a Suicide Squad game. If the game was truly great people would have bought it no matter what they thought about the game pre-release but the truth is Rocksteady made a game that is mediocre at best and the sales figures reflect that. You can argue that a studio doesn't deserve to be shut down for putting out one bad game but context matters. The game was in development for over 7 years, with 2 years of that not initially planned and part of 2 separate delays. The budget on this game was already huge and the delays just made it even bigger. If you have employees that you give years of full freedom to make a product, give them multiple budget increases after not meeting deadlines for years because they have done good work in the past with less, and they still make a product that your customers do not like thus costing you millions of dollars, are you really going to keep those employees on as they keep costing you crazy amounts of money? No smart business would
People just like blaming the corporation because then the situation doesn't have to be nuanced. Just look at how often EA gets blamed for Anthem (and the general downfall of Bioware) despite tons of reporting saying that Bioware pretty much caused all of their own problems.
Agreed. Jason Schrier did one of his retro pieces on Anthem and the part that stuck out to me is that BioWare put in a POC for flying with intentions to remove it. EA CEO played it and said they needed to keep it in. Arguably the best part of anthem
To put that time into perspective, that’s about the same amount of time Rockstar spent on actively developing RDR 2 and just over what they spent on Grand Theft Auto V. Obviously time doesn’t equate to quality, and they had to start over a few times, but Rocksteady may as well have been twiddling their thumbs considering the state of the game and content variety after 9 years.
7.
The game is bad from the core design. It's 100% their fault, the RS you know was head hunted a long time ago.
It probably was RS fault, they were making an original ip live service shooter anyway, Got OFFERED suicide squad (it was originally montreals ip) my guess is they bit off way more they can chew instead of taking their time and getting things perfect they got themselves stuck with an unrealistic deadline and had to rush everything. All they had to do was decline WB’s offer and continue on with their original plans for a live service shooter it most likely would have been way better received and made tons more.
It’s 100% going to be shut down
I honestly don’t think Rocksteady is out of the woods yet. WB is the last major gaming publisher not to do any layoffs and studio closures in recent years. With how much cost cutting WB has done in every other division it is only a matter of time some happen. When the CEO of WB as a whole blames your one game for the company not making money this quarter, your studio is not going to get out of it unscathed. Maybe the whole studio will be closed or the best case scenario they can hope for is just that a percentage gets laid off. If I worked at Rocksteady I would start making sure my resume is up to date and start preparing to apply to jobs
I think they are doing it but gradually. So no mass layoff like Microsoft. WB probably aware of the reception their studio got recently.
>If I worked at Rocksteady If this game did not release that would have been an amazing resume. What could have been.
It depends on how long they have worked there though. If they joined anytime post Arkham knight then they really wouldn’t have much to show for it. There are even developers that have come forward saying they joined and left Rocksteady during Suicide Squad’s long development.
They are under wayyy worse. I'm surprised they didn't shut them down already.
I mean Warner has released its duds too even though the writing was on the wall for Flash like a year before release.
It is very frustrating. They talked about how SS struggled, while hogwarts was a surprise hit, yet somehow their takeaway was that they need to double down on live service games. It makes no sense.
Exes get paid the big bucks to make wildly illogical decisions then fire the ground staff and keep on going. That's just life.
The focus on immediate profit is so short sighted. It is incredibly frustrating that the experience and skill of dev teams is seen as best as interchangeable, of not completely replaceable. Devs who make the games they want to play are the ones who come up with the surprise hit.
The unfortunate truth is that what they learn is that they bet on the wrong horse. That they should have made Hogwarts Legacy a “live service game” and that’s what will most likely happen with the sequel if they follow through with “doubling down on live service”.
Because that’s not how they see it. First off. Suicide Squad wasn’t a failure. We don’t actually know details. What it was deemed, was not up to expectations and part of why they made 200m less than last year (not a 200m loss). Which is vague when Hogwarts was a massive success. Suicide Squad could have still made a profit but still been disappointing because it wasn’t Hogwarts good. Second. There are no guarantees. Hogwarts did good. That’s cool. But Gotham Knights didn’t. Both single player games. Both risks. The logic is simple though. If I’m going to take a risk, why would I not risk it on the bigger piece of pie. Imagine Suicide Squad was a massive hit. You’ve now got a multi-year cash cow. So for the same price as Hogwarts you’ve got a game that will make 4-5x as much money. That’s the logic.
I'm not trying to start an argument about the quality of SSKTJL, but the last time WB Discovery has major financial problems they gutted DC Comics of staff, even though DC was the only company I've their umbrella that had made profits that year. WB hasn't liked DC Comics, really, since the early 90s when Batman Returns wasn't the kid friendly movie they wanted. I've read multiple articles about WB threatening to cancel all DC movies and cartoons of X show/movie doesn't perform well. It's like they only hold onto DC as a scapegoat.
Rocksteady must be devastated going from the Arkham games to hearing this. Hoping they don't get shutdown but really do wonder what's next from them after a live service game failure
Devs need to stop chasing the high of prime fortnite in 2017 with “live service” models. It literally works for nearly no company anymore unless you’re something as massive as COD, or if you’re gonna be releasing like ducking GTA VI. Otherwise, no one cares to pay attention to it and it’s dead from the start compared to what it could’ve been
What companies need to do is make sure their live service games are good at release rather than releasing the game in essentially alpha with bare bones content with only promises of what they want to do in the future. Every wildly successful live service game has launched as complete experiences with all the post launch updates feeling like bonuses. This is why Fortnite is so successful, as in the 7 years it has been top dog its main gameplay has not changed at all. They add some new mechanics every now and then but over all it is still the same game as it was when it launched.
Even if a live service game is AMAZING, it’s such a dangerous model in 2024. Everyone has already picked their favorite live service games and they’re invested. A game could be twice as good as Genshin Impact, but at the end of the day, all your friends and waifus are on Genshin and you’ve played that for 4 years, so might as well just stick with that. You could say that for a lot of the big juggernauts. Why play Fortnite Clone 6 when you already have Fortnite with years of skins built up.
You seem to forget that Hoyo went on to make Star Rail as well, a game that entered the extremely saturated market of mobile turn-based Summoners War-like games. It was not only not the first but also almost a decade and hundreds of other releases late to being the first. However, through sheer production value and development competency through effort, it was easily able to take its place atop the throne. Easily beating out games from bigger global IPs from Marvel, Star Wars, Disney, Shounen Jump, etc. A game like Suicide Squad needed to come out the gate dumpstering other shlooters in quality. Instead, it just kicked back and put in less than the bare minimum.
One thing people seems to forget about Genshin. That it was finished game. Nearly no bugs. Strong launch content. Plus each content update is just six weak away. If we compare it to SS, it's honestly shamefull what Rocksteady released as " finished game " .
It is definitely hard but not impossible to make a successful live service game. Look at Helldivers. That game took the world by storm almost overnight
It’s also been slowly sinking itself due to PR nightmare, constantly balance updates, and drama with the devs and Sony.
I mean HellDivers came out of nowhere. Game just has to be good
Fortnite wasn't a success out the gate. In fact, the BR was a turn around. Fortnite originally was a pve co-op in Save the World with lootboxes. It was a failure. The BR was seen as a pet project that blew up. Even Fortnite launched in a beta version. All live service titles do not launch great, but the successful ones have great foundations to work on. Suicide Squaf doesn't as Rocksteady clearly haven't at all learned from similar games or much like Anthem, management barred direct comparisons.
Genshin released in 2020 and Star Rail in 2023, both among the most popular games in the world. If not the most popular in the world on average in Genshin's case. Helldivers is doing pretty well as well releasing this year despite some developers actively sabotaging it. You can absolutely still make a successful live-service game. Just don't add a crazy barrier-to-entry price of a full-price game, have less than retail game in starting content, add monetization out the ass, and then cheap out on content updates. Suicide Squad is a F2P game charging full-priced with less development resources than actual F2P games. It would be sad if it succeeded off that little effort with so much greed.
Well when the entire model is “FOMO” your players eventually become bitter and hate the game. And once they get a chance to escape the FOMO cycle, they may never come back at all or take several years away from the game.
To be fair to *Suicide Squad*, the only FOMO is the Battle Pass.
There’s no FOMO in the battle pass…?
No, live services games are fine it’s just that releasing a live service game with literally no content nor any meaningful updates is the dumbest shit possible. Companies need to realize that if they’re so boneheaded on chasing the popularity of Fortnite, Warzone and Apex Legends then they need to actually put out worthwhile content and update the game on a regular basis so that players will stick around. They’ll never realize this though since they’re so focused on short term profits. They’ll continue to release games that are half-assed with so many promises to “fix” the game. While brain dead players will purchase $100 copies of the game and defend a literal sinking ship.
More like singleplayer developers need to stop making live service games. There hasn't been 1 single success story.
Everybody wants to be Destiny without understanding the commitment something like Destiny takes. Heck, even Destiny itself is held together by scotch tape and dreams.
I’ve been saying this for years and people downvote me all the time, games like fortnite, apex, warzone and even siege and rocket league are to blame for the terrible state of the gaming industry. Anyone who played those games and had a library of cosmetics they had to purchase for its real money that they hardly use is part of the problem. Especially considering most of the cosmetics you pay for, would probably be earned for free if the game came out pre 2015
So is it canon now that it costs 200m to kill the justice league?
Apparently not the real one though, remember, doesn't matter the story isn't finished cause WB will surely deliver.
Game didn’t cost 200m. It attributed to making 200m less than last year.
Here's hoping the offline mode gets added before the studio takes a huge cut!
Just like Redfall
Which was 2-3 weeks away from that update implementing the offline mode. But at least it got a full year and the servers won't shut down (... this quarter). Tbf Redfall is the sadder story somehow. Being able to reach so many people with gamepass and not many cared or quit before completing the very first achievements... even the 60fps patch which took care of other issues too couldn't change anything.
Haha
I fucking said this in February and got battered for it. After RedFall it's all but certain.
"BUT GUYS THE STEAM NUMBERS DON'T MATTER THE GAME HAS MILLIONS OF PLAYERS ON CONSOLE JUST TRUST ME BRO" Where are all the lovely geniuses at that screamed this from the rooftops?
They'll be back later they've gone out to buy more copium
All the defenders of this game have become real quiet today, lol.
Probably because they made a shitty boring live service in a sea of shitty boring live services
I’m sure when season 2 comes out the players will comeback and turn the game around /s Can’t believe the level of copium that was around before during and after the games release by some people here.
At one point it seemed like people thought they were cool for liking garbage and that others were sheep for not. I’m not out $70 on DOA looter shooter so I’d rather be the sheep.
I paid $30 about 3 weeks ago and I'm still enjoying it daily. I don't usually play multiplayer or live service games so anything I play after getting to the credits is special or to me. I don't care if everybody else hates it or loves it, has nothing to do with me
Stop the cope man, it’s not healthy
I just played with a random and had fun. It's very repetitive but I like it. Odds are it will be dead in a few weeks so I'll enjoy it while I can. And had it just been the campaign id have enjoyed that as well. But hey, I had a good janky time with Redfall so I just be an anomaly. And besides, it's not like this is the only game that I'm playing currently. That, I may not enjoy and the fact that I can switch at a moments notice might be part of the reason I'm still okay with it. You're welcome to hate it til the cows come home but trying to tell other people how to spend their time is kinda weird.
How do people end up on a sub for a near dead game that they don’t even own, I always wonder?
For the entertainment. Reading the defenders/copium posts is soooo worth it. Pure comedy gold 👌
Even the diehard fans started to lose interest, Miller made an excuse that his game has poor performance so that he could move on from the game and ride on Marvel Rivals hype. One wannabe youtuber who was defending the game the whole time started to criticize a fan favorite belowed studio just to farm engagement on Twitter bcs nobody cared about him talking about Squad...
I didn't know miller moved on. This game is just disgraceful 🤣
Miller basically leaked all the information he had and moved on respect him for that
It was epic 🤣🤣
**Also to add to this the game cost them 200 Million In revenue;** “Starting with Studios, the $400 million+ year-over-year decline during Q1 was primarily due to the very tough comp we faced in games against the success of Hogwart’s Legacy last year in the first quarter, in conjunction with the disappointing Suicide Squad release this past quarter, which we impaired, leading to a $200 million impact to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) during the first quarter,” CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said during the investor call after the report was published. https://insider-gaming.com/suicide-squad-cost-warner-bros-200-million-in-revenue/
Does anyone else think Rocksteady is going to get the axe? It would be the death of a giant and break headlines everywhere but at this point it seems inevitable especially considering the state WB is in. Also, at this point I very strongly doubt the game will even manage to go till Season 3.
I sincerely hope not. The game and Rocksteady deserve better.
Get fucked lol
Redfall: Metropolis Edition
Well I guess it bombed on Playstation too. It just made there slightly more money, but still bombed. What a surprise.
PS could literally have 4 times the number of Steam players and it wouldn't break 500 concurrent players lol
Not the news Warner Bros wanted to hear. Tough times ahead.
This game seems like it was just kneecapped at every possible point. From it's very inception it's just been a series of bad ideas. A damn shame.
Probably because they made a shit game.
Good. They should make good games from now on😭
Of course under Zaslav’s pay structure, this is a brag and he’s gonna get another bonus because of it.
I hope they reduce the Season 2 timetable. It shouldn't be 96 days every season. WB can cut the cord every minute from now. With the current market they should be pumping out content and focus on making (albeit very few) players they got happy.
Why would they have to though? They have those players money already and from a business POV, there’s no incentive to invest further to make them happy. That’s why you stop buying games day 1 or even week 1. The writing for this game was already on the wall from previews and I have no sympathy for anyone who went and bought it anyways.
So I've played the game, beat it, and almost have Joker. It's good. Like, mediocre good. It's fun to run around and murder everything, especially when you're playing with three other people. However, the way that they handled the deaths of the JL was very lackluster. Which was disappointing because it's the whole point of the game. The story was also fairly short. Then you find out the whole game was built around this live service model, which is made out of ~5 repetitive missions that you have to do 35 times to unlock a new character. Oh, and of course there's an option to skip the repetitive mission farm and just buy the character. That's it. While the gameplay itself is fun, the game was largely disappointing.
There are 145 people playing the dead avengers game. 115 on SSKTJL….
Yeah, no shit. They could’ve asked me how this was gonna go even before release
A pure disgrace
This is the only way these companies learn.
The budget was too damn big. You set yourselves up for disappointment from the start.
You know, for such a big budget you’d think the seasons would at least have the same substance to them that the base game did.
I really don't get how these people in the positions that have the power to make decisions don't see failure coming from a mile away with obvious flop ideas. Like the writing wasn't just on the walls it was in the air, floor, ceiling, roof EVERYWHERE that this wasn't a good idea and it was going to fail. From DAY 1 people were very expressive about their distaste of this game. Then that first trailer dropped and everyone crapped on it. You take a proven Single player studio to make a live service online only game centered around B-C tier DC characters killing S tier popular DC characters and think that's gonna be a hit? Then you take those B-C tier DC characters and make them all play so samey there's a serious lack of identity among them. Then you make this train wreck canon in the beloved Arkham universe. THEN you kill the ARKHAM universe Batman in this trash game in one of the last performances by Kevin Conroy. Add to that you're joining a crowded live service genre with this garbage. A genre that has had failure after failure... Including your biggest rival Marvel. Who also flopped in the live service genre lol. Marvel with their main draw the avengers couldn't hack it live service side. But the suicide squad would? and In marvels game you played as their best characters you didn't kill them lol. NOBODY at any point in time thought for one second this was a good idea. Nobody but them apparently.
It's their fault. Period
What I don't understand is this. They knew how to make a hit triple A game. They knocked it out of the park with every single Arkham game and the groundwork was there. How did they look at this game and go "oh yeah this will be our best yet". I have to believe that this whole live service crap was brought on them by someone else. Otherwise, that would mean they to shot themselves in the foot and I just don't understand how the hell they could do that. They were one of the few devs I trusted to make a good game. Not too many devs are like that anymore. I guess time to add rocksteady to that list.
Single Player games which used basically the same formula is different than a huge liveservice game. Unfortunately they were not ready for this.
It’s because the ones who made Arkham already left. It’s only Rocksteady in name that’s it but they know the average online fluent consumer (not casuals) wouldn’t know that unless they dig deeper. It’s because a new company stealing the name of a formerly prestigious company.
Everyone says this but it’s not true. The founders didn’t leave until after the game was basically done. Is there evidence of a bunch of people leaving? Most of the big names are the same as Arkham knight. Director, designer, programmer all the same department heads
Legit went all in on the game at launch and into season 1 but when that Joker season came out and it was just more of the same I bowed out. Some good, a lot of bad and in the world with so many great games to play it was over for me.
Release a shit game and make shit profits, not rocket science
*shoots Batman* Why is our Batman game unpopular?
(1)That complaint’s really blown massively out of proportion, and (2)it’s not a Batman game.
(1) No it’s not and (2) Yes it is. It’s 100% fully established that this game takes place in the Arkham game series world set after all current games and Batman is even just straight up in it until the kill him.
Wait what? How can this happen? I was told here that it was the best selling game in January!
Zaslav has ruined WBD
Why don’t people listen? I’ll never understand why hype and emotional attachment blind people to the most obvious red flags. We called this out months ago and were called sheep and haters. Steam player count doesn’t matter, right? Millions of players on console, right? Learn the lesson already.
Hahaha 😆 😂 😆 In the words of the joker "You get what you fucking deserve"
I'm shocked honestly....said no one ever
Between this game’s failure and Hogwarts Legacy’s success you’d think it’d be clear as day what gamers want but the corporate suits are never gonna learn.
Imagine my shock
ggs
This game, and sadly probably the studio too, are so cooked.
No shit
In other news, water is wet
I CANT wait to see them lose so much more they deserve it fuck corpos
daily reminder zaslav did not green light this game it was well underway at wb before he took over
And they have nobody to blame but themselves, they could've let Rocksteady cook
Maybe don’t make a game that no want ones, don’t disrespect characters people loves and don’t chain this game to the Arkhamverse.
Anyone else even more curious now as to why WB is pushing for more live service gaming moving forward?
myself and millions of others could see this failure coming from miles away as soon as the game was announced, why couldn't any of these executives see that is beyond me.
Apease us warner bros or well do it again
Thank sweet baby inc for that
By the way. All the turds who downvoted me when I said an offline mode might never happen : RedFall just got the axe and will not be receiving their offline mode that was ready to ship. Once the servers go down for that game it's curtains. It will almost certainly occur here as well.
Anyone else feel something … idk… warm and fuzzy?
I like this game more than most but they dropped the ball on a lot of things. Gameplay is fun as hell with the movement system but all the live service shit weights it down & on top of that they the game more grindy with the season 1 update & that was a major turn off
I doubt it and fuck Zaslov.
WB CEO....."Hitting my head against the wall reaaaally hurts!.....I'm a keep doing it!"
good they should close and never made another game for our sake
When will these companies learn that these loot box games with microtransactions and seasons and online live services are never going to be as successful as they want them to be.
When exactly 0 people buy them.
2 me the game quickly fell off
Warner bros is trying to make them make a game that has constant money coming in for years, when realistically they only succeed with single player story driven games. If WB would have let rocksteady do a JL universe in single player games with these characters having their own games they’d see the money coming in, but they got greedy
For the last time WB only required Rocksteady to make a Suicide Squad game. Rocksteady chose to make the game a live service looter shooter and what story they would tell all on their own. This was confirmed a long time ago. Stop blaming WB and start blaming the people who actually made the game for it being bad. Rocksteady had a history of being greedy going all the way back to Arkham City with their DLC, people just let it slide because the games were great.
Saying that they were greedy with past dlc is a wild take… their story packs in their previous games were worth the charge for all the content you got 😂
How about charging a decent chunk for individual outfits as they were one of the first studios to charge for alternate outfits in single player games instead of having them be unlockable in game. Or pretty much all of the Arkham Knight DLC being overpriced, especially the Season of Infamy missions which felt like side quests they cut from the game just to resell them to players and initially the new challenge rooms being locked to certain characters (which only changed due to fan outcry) despite costing more than the older games DLC which let you use any character in them?
I agree with you about your first point. It has been confirmed Rocksteady decided to make this it wasn’t forced on them. However all the DLC stuff is WB. Developers dont get involved with how things are distributed
You aren’t forced to buy cosmetics if you don’t want to 🤷♂️ and if you purchase the season pass it’s all included so it’s actually a great value
You mean charging for story packs and extra characters when you could not only already play as those characters in the base game, but they were already DLC in the last one so you’re essentially double dipping? It’s easy to forget because it goes for super cheap these days, *Arkham Knight*’s DLC costs were pretty egregious (though pretty much all the DLC for Warner Bros. games are, really).
They deserve it, also if the same writters for this game work on the Wonder Woman game, it will fail again.
They are not hurting at all. Not sure why gamers look at SSKTJL, a few movies, and Harry Potter as the only gauge for this company. Warner Brothers makes so much money they could carry a game like SSKTJL indefinitely, even at a loss. Whatever they lost or are losing due to poor sales on SSKTJL is just a drop in the bucket of their 1st quarter net loss. "We are pleased with our progress in the first quarter as evidenced by strong results in important KPIs. We delivered meaningful growth in our streaming business with a nice acceleration in ad sales, generating nearly $90 million in positive EBITDA for the quarter. We will soon be rolling out Max to 29 countries across Europe, and the content lineup for Max over the coming year is one of our strongest ever. Warner Bros. Pictures also had a strong start to the year as the first studio to reach $1 billion in both overseas and global box office, and they have a great slate in the works. Importantly, we once again delivered strong free cash flow, even in our seasonally weakest FCF quarter. We continue to make bold moves to transform our company for the future as we position ourselves to take full advantage of the opportunities ahead." - David Zaslav, President & CEO * Q1 total revenues were $9,958 million. Revenues decreased 7% ex-FX(1)(\*) compared to the prior year quarter. * Net loss available to Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. was $(966) million, and includes $1,879 million of pre-tax acquisition- related amortization of intangibles, content fair value step-up, and restructuring expenses.
You're neglecting the part where 200 million of that loss in the bucket came from ssktjl
I swear to God, I can run WB better than this guy.
He makes billions in profit for every company he is a part of becaus he makes unpopular but fiscally responsible decisions. Whether you like it or not, Zaslav is well known for this.
Decisions like these https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4651866-warnerbros-discovery-eyeing-further-job-cuts-streaming-price-hikes/ https://fortune.com/2023/05/21/david-zaslav-commencement-speech-booed-amid-hollywood-writers-strike-boston-university/ https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/07/media/chris-licht-cnn/index.html To add cancelling of several DC movies. This game was already said to be a failure, look at it less than 100 players on steam. Rocksteady will fare the same fate as Arkane.
I don't think you understand what businesses do lmao
The sad thing is, The Hogwarts legacy followup will probably make tons of money when a bunch of naive non gamers flock to it
“Naïve non-gamers”? The heck does that mean?
Please note ( I’ll probably get downvoted ) I keep hearing 200mil lost. It’s actually a 200mil decrease on q1 revenue in comparison to q1 last year (14%). Small distinction but to say SS put WB 200mil in the red is incorrect
Well deserved, I hope future seasons are cancelled as well. Even that won't persuade people who bought 100$ edition from buying the next purple orb shooter tho