The developers behind Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League say they were surprised the game flopped. Fans weren’t.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier caught up with the game’s director, Axel Rydby, and associate design director Johnny Armstrong, two of the top creatives on the Rocksteady title that released in February 2024 to poor sales and reviews and ultimately saddled Warner Bros. with a $200 million loss.
The most telling admission comes from Armstrong, who told Bloomberg he was caught off guard by just how negative the reactions were when the game launched, and that when Warner decided to move on from Suicide Squad without even attempting to turn things around, something in him broke.
Per the report, he said, “I can’t do this again,” and questioned whether he was done with the industry entirely.
Surprised? Really?
Fans rejected the game from the first trailer
Here’s the thing: nobody who was paying attention to the actual audience was surprised.
The backlash started years before launch. The moment fans learned Rocksteady — the studio behind the beloved Batman Arkham trilogy — was making a live-service looter-shooter where you gun down the Justice League, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative.
The trailers were ratioed. The delays piled up. The “always online” requirement was torched. The writing was on the wall from the 2020 DC FanDome reveal onward.
Then the leaked cutscenes ahead of launch confirmed the worst: Boomerang pissing on The Flash’s corpse, Harley Quinn shooting Batman in the face in Kevin Conroy’s send-off to the character, Green Lantern executed in his underwear — while, of course, only Wonder Woman got a heroic death.
Add in the involvement of Sweet Baby Inc., the “narrative consultation” studio gamers have come to abhor and avoid at all costs, and fans knew exactly what this game was before it ever hit shelves.
The game shat on the characters and shat on the fans, and the fans returned the favor by not buying it.
The numbers followed the sentiment.
The game sold less than half of what even the failed Marvel’s Avengers managed, and WB’s games revenue cratered 41% in the quarter following release, with the earnings report directly blaming Suicide Squad‘s weak performance.
Warner pulled the plug so fast that the game’s final “ending” arrived as comic panels retconning the entire Justice League into clones, a fitting punchline for a title called Kill the Justice League.
Bloomberg’s interview mentions none of that.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League remains the cautionary tale of the era: audiences told them exactly what they didn’t want, and $200 million later, the message finally got through.
