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.
“That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore,” Rydby explains. “I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in.”
“It was a big culture shift,” Armstrong adds. “We put all these hours in, but it didn’t feel like it was tangibly getting better. Everyone felt like they were having to run to stand still.”
To add to the stress the devs were given ridiculous deadlines: “Six months isn’t enough to do any fundamental changes,” Rydby says. “That’s just enough to just fix as many bugs as you can and see if you can squeeze in a bit of feature tweaks here and there.” But in this time they were expected to fix everything and find the answers to questions like “How many players can we reach with the feature?” and “How can we twist this design into something that can be more replayable?” asked by executives.
It was all too much, and the unrealistic expectations and pressures of creating an infinite money machine disguised as a live service game was too much. “I felt everything drained from me,” Armstrong says. “I said, ‘I can’t do this again. I don’t know if I’m done with the industry, but I’m done.’ I could feel myself coming apart at the seams.”
Armstrong and Rydby ended up leaving Rocksteady and teaming up together to make Secret of Circadia, an RPG deckbuilding game, that has just had its Kickstarter release in hopes of raising $11,404 to help develop the game.
“I think as an industry we are severely losing our way,” Rydby adds. “It used to be passion projects that you loved and hoped other people loved too. When they did, it was such an amazing feeling. It became less and less of that. It became: ‘Let’s hope it sells. Let’s hope we get money from it.'”
The worst part of all this? I don’t think the suits learnt their lesson. It feels like we’ve been saying this for a while, but games should be made out of love and passion, not because shareholders finally figured out they can make a quick buck from them. The powers that be should just learn to give talented developers the resources and space they need to make cool shit. Swen Vincke once said, the formula for making good games is stupidly simple: “A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves.”
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