A screenshot from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady Studios

The abysmal failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has reportedly lead to mass layoffs at the game’s developer Rocksteady.

Character art for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (2024), Rocksteady

A report from Tom Philips at Eurogamer claims the company laid off over half of its Quality Assurance department reducing it from 33 to 15. The report also claims that the layoffs affect those outside of Quality Assurance as well and have affected individuals across the board from junior staff to individual who have been with the company for over five years.

A number of employees allegedly told the outlet that “product quality will now suffer as a result” of the layoffs.

A scene from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady

The game did so poorly financially that Rocksteady’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million impairment charge on it.

During the company’s first quarter earnings results webcast, Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels stated, “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 during the first quarter.”

Wiedenfels had previously detailed during the company’s fourth quarter 2023 earnings webcast, “This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key video game releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comp in Q1.”

A screenshot from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady

More recently in the company’s Earnings Release for its 2024 Q2, Warner Bros. Discovery shared that its Games division revenue declined by 41%.

The report stated, “Games revenue declined 41% ex-FX, primarily driven by the weak performance of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League this year, compared to the strong performance of Hogwarts Legacy in the prior year.”

Wiedenfels added during the Earnings Call, “While, as we’ve called out last quarter, games are still struggling against last year’s Hogwarts Legacy comp, and a muted response to Suicide Squad this year.”

The company’s CEO and President of Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette also addressed the game on the call as well. He said, “The reality is we’ve had the unfortunate, in the short period of 12 months, we went from having the record year that we had in 2023 with Hogwarts Legacy, to unfortunately having the opposite side of that spectrum with Suicide Squad.”

Character art for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (2024), Rocksteady

As noted by data from SteamDB, the game has lost almost 99% of its player base since it launched in February.

The game hit a peak concurrent player base of 13,459 when it launched in February. However, it has declined by 98.9% since then with the most recent 24-hour peak only hitting 144 players.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League SteamDB charts

The layoffs are not surprising given the game’s massive financial failure. There was also a rumor at the beginning of June from YouTuber Vara Dark that claimed Rocksteady might end up getting shut down due to the abysmal failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Dark shared on X, “Warner Bros is internally talking about closing Rocksteady or halving their 250 employees after Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s bomb.”

“I have heavily covered Warner Bros Games and Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League since release because of what it represented for Warner Bros Games and a beloved franchise,” she continued. “When it was greenlit, we were seeing a giant scramble for studios to create live-service games and this one released too late plus the content did not resonate with players.”

Amanda Waller in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady

Furthermore, she noted, “Rocksteady Studios’ co-founders and studio heads also departed the company back in 2022. Rocksteady is a shell of the company it used to be and we saw this happen recently with Embracer Group and Volition, a company that had 30 years of experience under their belt and it sounds as though Warner Bros is planning to pull the plug on Rocksteady, too. ”

“They have no other games publicly announced and there does not seem to be any confidence in them anymore. Even back in 2016 we got the Batman: Arkham VR game that was developed by Rocksteady and the new Batman: Arkham Shadow VR game is being done by Camouflaj. Only time will tell. Doesn’t seem like the future is very bright for Rocksteady,” she concluded.

 

A report a few days later from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier indicated that Warner Bros. Discovery was cutting back its support from the game.

He wrote on X that Rocksteady was only providing “barebones support” now. He added that it was “definitely not as much as they’d originally planned.”

Jason Schreier on X

Not only is Rocksteady allegedly only supplying barebones support for the game, but Schreier also claimed in a report for Bloomberg that the company’s employees “are now helping to develop a new ‘director’s cut’ version of Hogwarts Legacy.”

However, he did note that the company was planning “to pitch a new single-player game, which would return Rocksteady to its roots.”

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Sweet Baby Inc. credits

All of this comes as the game was boycotted due to the influence of Sweet Baby Inc. The game was added to the Sweet Baby Inc. detected Steam curator list, which has now grown to over 429,000 followers.

YouTuber Endymion, who has nearly 270,000 subscribers also observed that Sweet Baby Inc. and writer Amy-Leigh Shaw, who became an employee of Sweet Baby Inc. following her time with Rocksteady, helped ruin the game. He shared in February a week after the game released, “Of course, Amy tries to take the moral high ground here, but the truth is that the damage is done and what her and the team over at Sweet Baby has done to Suicide Squad not to mention other games like Spider-Man 2 and more. Everything they touch lessens and cheapens the stories and characters within them. It’s gotten so bad that the name Sweet Baby is all but considered a taboo term. It’s just as bad as when customers label a product as woke now.”

“Now, openly stating your game has any relations to Sweet Baby has become code for people to avoid that product entirely like the plague because chances are whatever your game is, if Sweet Baby is involved, it’ll be ruined and made into a pandering mess to some capacity,” he added.

What do you make of this report that Rocksteady is laying off employees?