After an 8-year hiatus from releasing new games, Rocksteady unveiled Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in 2020, touting an original story featuring DC supervillains Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang. However, the title has since been plagued by delays, leadership shakeups, and questions of whether its chaotic, irreverent tone can resonate in the current gaming landscape.
Now slated for a May 26, 2023, launch after being pushed back nearly a full year, Suicide Squad already appears to be in serious trouble and struggling to generate much excitement amongst gamers. Rocksteady has remained uncharacteristically silent in recent months, refusing to show any actual gameplay of Suicide Squad or offer previews beyond flashy cinematic trailers.
RELATED: FREUDIAN SLIP: Alaqua Cox Signs “M-SHE-U” During Marvel’s Echo Interview In Disney Promotion
Industry analysts and fans alike worry Suicide Squad may end up a critical and commercial failure unless Rocksteady can pull off a last-minute miracle. But the studio’s troubles reflect wider upheaval, including a possible buyout by Chinese gaming giant NetEase as its parent company Warner Bros shifts video game strategies after merging with Discovery.
“Rocksteady has lost the faith of gamers,” said industry watcher Alyssa Mercante. “The studio made its name on polished, story-driven superhero games with compelling combat. But the messy development of Suicide Squad doesn’t bode well, especially with no gameplay in sight mere months from launch.“
Once heralded as a master of slick superhero games, Rocksteady risks tarnishing its stellar reputation if Suicide Squad ends up feeling more like a rushed cash grab than a labor of love. With development stumbling towards the finish line instead of sprinting, Suicide Squad may require more than Harley Quinn’s giant mallet to smash expectations and convince gamers this chaotic mission was ever worth assembling.
It makes sense why, this week after the Suicide Squad trailers, fans haven’t stopped spreading the persistent rumor that Rocksteady’s developers had originally proposed a Superman-themed game, but Warner Bros. turned them down, forcing them to create this one. People familiar with Rocksteady’s tactics over the past ten years claim that Rocksteady never pitched or worked on a Superman game.
The studio started developing a Batman VR game after Arkham Knight came out in 2015, and after that, they worked on an undisclosed multiplayer game based on an original franchise. According to individuals acquainted with Rocksteady’s tactics over the past ten years, the company never worked on or pitched in a Superman game. In the wake of Arkham Knight’s 2015 release, the studio started developing a virtual reality game based on Batman and, later on, an undisclosed multiplayer title that is part of an original franchise. At the end of 2016, a Suicide Squad game at the Warner Bros. studio in Montreal was canceled, and the property was subsequently given to Rocksteady, which began working on the current iteration in 2017.
RELATED: Marvel’s Echo The Second Worst-Reviewed MCU TV Show And Media Shills Go All-Out Trying To Salvage It
The Superman rumor appears to have originated from a user on X, formerly Twitter, named James Sigfield back in 2020, who, over direct messages, said he had been mistaken. “I corrected it in a later tweet, but it never caught on,” he said. “The person that gave me the info got the studios mixed up.”
Why, then, has such a flimsy rumor been so prevalent that fans continue to bring it up on social media today? Likely because nobody wants to believe the reality: that one of their favorite studios has been working on a multiplayer live-service game for more than half a decade that few seemed interested in while yanking the gamers’ chains on one of the most hyped non-games in a decade.
And the hype has been real for decades. Factor 5 and Brash Entertainment were developing a Superman video game in the 2000s that originally was going to be the tie-in game to the canceled “Superman Returns” sequel but ultimately changed into an original story with an open-world Metropolis.
‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’ had several false starts and was delayed multiple times as the company tried to transition to an unfamiliar genre. By the time it comes out, it will have been in development for nearly seven years — about the same length of time that it took Rocksteady to release all three Arkham games.
With the market extremely oversaturated, it’s terrible news for Rocksteady. In a time when even industry veterans like Destiny can’t seem to grow, it’s difficult to see a new multiplayer service game succeeding, even if the upcoming Suicide Squad game rises above low expectations.
Would you play a Superman game made by Arkham-era Rocksteady? What do you think about the gamers getting hyped for a Superman game that ended up being a red herring for Suicide Squad? Let us know in the comments!
If they started working on a Superman game right after Arkham Knight, that might’ve been cool. Poor supes has so may bad videogames to his name, it’s his real kryptonite.
I’d rather have no more superman games than another faceplant. Besides they’d make him an emo hamlet anyways.
This video game was dead on arrival.
The whole premise of this Suicide Squad game is so dumb from a business standpoint. Even with our society being as screwed up as it is and calling evil “good” and good “evil”, people don’t want to watch their heroes getting killed by a bunch of losers. Well, okay, Antifa people probably want to see that, but no one else.
They should have made the game JLA vs. Crime Syndicate. If the story were compelling, that could have been a huge hit. And the power sets of the two teams’ members are duplicates – and the voices could have been, too – which would have reduced production costs.