The game cost Warner Bros. $200 million and bombed at launch. But for the people who actually built it, the damage ran a lot deeper than a financial loss.
Two former Rocksteady developers, Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong, have spoken candidly about what it was like to work on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League during its most difficult period. Their account paints a picture of a studio that started the project with genuine confidence and ended it with people questioning whether they ever wanted to make games again.
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From Batman to a spreadsheet nobody could read
Rocksteady came off the back of the acclaimed Batman Arkham series. That pedigree bred real confidence going into Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Armstrong describes the early mindset as a kind of earned swagger: the team had shipped hits, so of course they could pull this off too.
That confidence evaporated fast. As delays stacked up and the budget ballooned, the pressure from above shifted the entire nature of the work. Rydby describes the moment things turned: "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."
The key here is what that spreadsheet represented. The game had stopped being a creative project and become a financial instrument. Every design decision filtered through questions like how many players a feature could reach, and how to twist mechanics to maximize replayability and monetization. Passion had been replaced by metrics.
Impossible deadlines and the pressure to fix everything at once
Rydby describes being given six-month windows to address fundamental problems with the game, which he flatly says wasn't enough time. "Six months isn't enough to do any fundamental changes. That's just enough to fix as many bugs as you can and see if you can squeeze in a bit of feature tweaks here and there."
Armstrong puts it even more bluntly: "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."
That combination, unrealistic expectations from executives who wanted an infinite live service money machine, and a team grinding through crunch without seeing meaningful progress, created an environment that started breaking people down.
'I could feel myself coming apart at the seams'
Armstrong's description of his breaking point is stark. "I felt everything drained from me. 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."
Rydby frames it as a broader industry problem, not just a Rocksteady one. "I think as an industry we are severely losing our way. 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."
What most players miss when a game like this fails is that behind the bad reviews and the empty servers, there are developers who poured years into something and came out the other side genuinely damaged by the experience.
What they built next, and why it matters
Rydby and Armstrong left Rocksteady after Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and teamed up to make Secret of Circadia, an RPG deckbuilder. They recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of around $11,400, a figure that is almost comically small compared to the $200 million WB lost on their last project. The contrast says everything.
Here's the thing: Secret of Circadia is exactly the kind of game that gets made when developers are building something they actually want to play. That's the direct opposite of what Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League became. And the fact that two people who nearly quit the industry entirely are now making small, passion-driven games feels like the most honest possible response to everything that went wrong.
The live service model didn't just produce a bad game. It nearly cost the industry two developers who clearly still have something to say. If you want to see what happens when that drive gets redirected somewhere healthier, Kill the Brickman is a solid example of the kind of focused, intentional design that studios like Rocksteady used to champion before the spreadsheets took over. For more games worth your time, browse our gaming guides, or check out the strategy games hub if deckbuilders like Secret of Circadia are your speed.
