After the rather tepid reaction to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Rocksteady Studios is experiencing a major setback in its ark of Batman game’s success. The studio has had to let go of a large percentage of its staff following the poor reception of its new release.
The Eurogamer report outlines that “the vast majority [of layoffs] are related to quality assurance roles” with Rocksteady QA head Ben Ackroyd explaining, ” This means lots of talented good people Kred(I think you mean fired!) Cast! The cuts, referred to by sources as redundancies, have come as a surprise – one staffer found out while he was on paternity leave that his job had been axed.
This has resulted in a greatly reduced QA team doing its best to pick up the pieces and support ongoing projects still going through development as well as future ones.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was supposed to make out some kind of grand follow-up (or prequel?) tribute/response to Rocksteady’s vaunted Arkham games. But when the game was released it was in no way an amazing experience, getting only mediocre reviews from both critics and fans.
What was particularly surprising and disappointing about the news of this game, at least to those who wanted a follow-up single-player experience after last playing one in an Arkham series good entry overall I would argue Deathstroke does not do worse than what he did before live-service systems were even popular (but you are going under when modelo trash) is that it will be a service based monetized model with potential grind if “Seasons” become involved.
As for what Rocksteady itself is doing next, that remains a mystery. This puts pressure on the rest of the team to get out and release a banger given those layoffs. Whether that or living-service games is the path of least resistance for them isn’t clear.
In summary: Rocksteady Studios has entered tough times after the miserable performance of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, as hundreds lost their jobs. With the studio eyeing up whatever it comes next, fans and industry insiders are hoping to see how Rocksteady will bounce back amid public support of their future direction.