After the valiant and woke developers at Rocksteady Studios subverted the deranged femme fatale in Harley Quinn into a flat and ugly endorsement for transgenderism, it’s perhaps not surprising that their latest game struggled with sales, now resulting in employee cutbacks.
“Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,” a live-service game released earlier this year, has faced a rocky reception. It debuted with just 13,000 concurrent players and saw its player base dwindle rapidly, prompting early price cuts.
Future seasonal content featuring a more humanized and possibly homosexual version of the iconic Joker, along with a ugly, fat lesbian twist on Mrs. Freeze, have failed to breathe new life into the big-budget release. This has resulted in a significant $200 million loss for parent company Warner Brothers.
The game featured dialogue with strong feminist themes and character designs that adhered to socially acceptable, “unsexualized” standards. It also included a race swapped version of Deadshot and favored appealing to the LGBTQ+ community, both as a business and through in-game content.
The game was developed in collaboration with Sweet Baby Inc., a well-known consultation firm that leverages cancel culture to encourage companies to pay for their guidance. This firm aims to ensure that story narratives and character designs do not offend marginalized groups or ethnicities.
A live-service game is designed to be ongoing, with no definitive narrative end, and is continually updated to keep players engaged over time. Since “Suicide Squad” doesn’t offer an offline mode, players must be connected to the internet and the game servers to play. Currently, the game has fewer than 150 concurrent players on any given day on PC.
The release of the live-service game, which failed to gain traction, ultimately cost Warner Brothers $200 million. With only a handful of players remaining after just a few months, there is growing concern that the game might be shut down and its servers terminated. Without an offline mode, this would mean the game could no longer be played and would effectively disappear.
Surprisingly, it seems Rocksteady itself is facing difficulties. According to a new report, the failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has forced the studio to scale back its operations and reduce its staff.
As reported by Eurogamer Editor-in-Chief Tom Phillips, who received information directly from studio employees, Rocksteady has seen its team size nearly halved over the past month, dropping from 33 to 15 members, with poor sales of Suicide Squad cited as the reason for this “restructuring.”
In addition to the QA team members, the job cuts have affected numerous junior staff and several employees who had been with Rocksteady for over five years.
To add insult to injury, a message posted on social media revealed that one staff member was reportedly let go during their paternity leave. According to employees, the cuts to Rocksteady’s QA department involved several team members with quote-on-quote “specialized knowledge,” which apparently will force the remaining staff to take on extra work as they continue work on the sinking ship that is Suicide Squad now as a skeleton crew.
Quality assurance has little significance in an industry where many games are released broken and unfinished anyway. The concept of a live service game often serves as an excuse to avoid delivering a polished, complete product from the start.
It also appears that neither Rocksteady nor Warner Brothers invested time or resources in conducting playtests to gather feedback from actual customers, perhaps to avoid risking “the message” they wanted to convey.
Inclusive game design, a focus on tokenized representation, and other initiatives have been heavily influenced by corporate agendas, such as those promoted by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. These ideologies are pursued in exchange for short-term financial gains, which are increasingly unsustainable.
AAA game development is no longer a viable business model, as many of today’s developers lack the skills of their predecessors. The majority of the Western games industry now comprises feminist women and other “marginalized” individuals, which has led to a decline in overall quality as modern game developers are creativity bankrupt.
The outcome has been a complete shift away from masculinity in video game design, with games transitioning from entertainment and escapism to what can only be described as propaganda, created by feminists for feminists.
This shift is a key reason many of these games, like Sony’s Concord struggle in the open market. The majority of the gaming audience, heterosexual men, are increasingly aware that they have been disenfranchised and are choosing to steer clear of games that promote these messages.
Take, for example, Del Walker, a developer who criticized Palworld for “cheating” by blending the popular open-world survival crafting genre with elements from one of the world’s largest franchises, Pokemon, creating a game that took the world by storm.
Del Walker, a Black designer who has worked on titles like The Last of Us Part 2 Remaster and Suicide Squad, has pointed out how the industry’s focus on DEI and ESG initiatives has impacted his work. He claimed that his attempts to create attractive characters of color were deliberately undermined to make them ugly.
This confirms that DEI and ESG efforts aren’t truly about representation but rather about fitting the standards of a hedge fund-backed ideology, where only those who conform to a certain, Black, queer, ugly and androgynous aesthetic are embraced.
In its Q1 earnings report for May 2024, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav noted that the disparity between the performance of Suicide Squad and Hogwarts Legacy resulted in a $200 million impact on EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) for the first quarter.
Last month, the company reported a 41% decline in Q2 gaming revenue compared to the previous year, mainly due to the poor performance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League compared to the strong showing of Hogwarts Legacy.
Rocksteady Studios not only abandoned the Arkhamverse but also alienated their fans by releasing an online-only live service game filled with propaganda, developed in collaboration with Sweet Baby Inc. As a result, Warner Brothers is now scrubbing the studio, purging its employees and likely preparing to shut down both Rocksteady and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
It’s surprising that Rocksteady didn’t face layoffs sooner.
