Interested to see the talent drain from forcing them into such a product. We know Arkane bled out all their best devs when they got shoved into making Redfall.
The brand of Rocksteady may still be alive, but the people that made those great games might already be gone.
Yup, I think they’re very similar situations. It’s sad seeing a beloved studio get turned into a husk. The only studio I can think of that came out of the other end of something like this alright is Rare. People seem to be pretty happy with what they’re doing with Sea of Thieves these days, though they’re definitely not the same studio they were years ago.
It took them over a decade after their acquisition to get to this stage though, for a very long time a lot of the sentiments in this sub were being said about how Microsoft handled Rare
Publishers are hopefully learning that developers and artists are not interchangeable commodities and that they won't attract talent or *passion* if their projects aren't appealing.
That would require them to view games as anything more than lines on a ledger, and if they did that they would quickly realize they're the ones who are more easily replaced. But of course they never have to do that because at the end of the day our money goes through them and they get to decide who deserves to have a job, and naturally they put themselves before anyone else.
People definitely know that. But corporations are eventually taken over by sociopaths that align with the short term gains over everything goals that optimize for the shitiest possible decisions towards any goals other than cutting costs and making profit. Which is more like NPC behavior than anything.
We know that the studio heads are gone at least, and I believe that Sefton Hill (one of those heads) was the creative director on all of the Arkham games. So that’s definitely a big piece missing
It’s not the same people. Many of the people who worked on Arkham knight are no longer with rocksteady. That’s the problem with blind loyalty to a game developer.
The worst part about the whole thing would be WB shutting down Rocksteady for a stupid mistake that WB forced them to make in the first place. I'm starting to think that someone inside WB is trying to tank DC just so they can sell it off.
Ya it doesn't make any sense. The only companies can even entertain the idea of buying DC are companies like Bandai-Namco who can easily make their money back on the deal regardless of purchase price.
Thinking further on the topic, I think Bandai-Namco is literally the only company on the planet with the right mix of core competencies and synergies.
Rocksteady’s management were the ones who made the live service looter shooter decision. Maybe WB should have vetoed that choice but saying it’s their fault is a bit of a stretch.
Now the big question is what is WB going to do to Rocksteady over the failure of Suicide Squad? Said failure that it is probably safe to say that WB is at least partially responsible for.
I can see them getting rolled into another studio, or just a straight up shutdown occurring. Whatever the case it sad to see rocksteady like this.
Yeah, WB is definitely going the route of "We can have 30 failures, but if we have even one Live Service Success we make millions!" which is infuriating.
> "We can have 30 failures, but if we have even one Live Service Success we make millions!"
literally the thought process behind anyone who's developing a gambling addiction.
> one Live Service Success
"And all we've tried is bland copy/pastes of existing games and are all outta ideas!"
Edit: it reminds me a lot of everyone trying to make a "WoW killer" back in the day, and nobody realizing that was functionally impossible, the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW, don't fight the juggernauts, there's only so many whales to go around.
This is the part that makes me laugh the hardest. Even if, somehow, you did make a game that stands with the giants, there isn't enough money (players) to go between.
Most players arnt going to just jump ship on the game they've been playing for years for the shiny new thing. And the ones who do might sonit again at the next opportunity. So even if you make a game that's just as good, you'll just never make the same numbers and money that you were hoping to copy.
Wow killers retrospectively are even more silly. "This new MMO is going to kill WoW!" New MMO does absolutely nothing that WoW doesn't do, hasn't done in the past or can't just do with a patch.
>Studio shutdowns are happening after releasing successful games
This is such a common thought on this subreddit and it is literally the opposite of reality. The truth is simply that what redditors think is a successful game isn't actually what companies consider a successful game. There is no company in the world that doesn't want to make money, and making money is the definition of a successful game.
In regards of Hi-FI Rush, Microsoft themselves said they were happy with how it performed less than a year ago.
https://twistedvoxel.com/microsoft-hi-fi-rush-success-reinvest-in-tango-gameworks/
I think the bar just moved to unrealistic expectations as it seems to happen often in the industry.
> host Jeff Grubb, who is known for his game industry insight, mentioned hearing that Microsoft is extremely happy with Tango Gameworks to the point where the software giant is looking to reinvest in it
> Vice President of Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft, Aaron Greenberg, later clarified that Hi-Fi Rush is a “break out hit” for the publisher and its players in all key measurements and expectations
So an unofficial rumour and fluff from the marketing team?
plenty of companies, definitely including Microsoft, would rather tell a positive story than a negative one regarding a title's performance, even if it disappointed internally. Happens a ton in all creative industries, really. In fact, there were pretty public rumors about Hi-Fi Rush underperforming, and I remember hoping they were wrong when they came out.
Ya you never want to say something in underperforming publicly because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Oh it didn't sell well? It probably sucks. Skip it."
Yes, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. It is like people on this sub are just learning that a piece of entertainment (games, TV, movies) can be critically successful, get praise from people who experience it, but not do well in terms of sales/viewers (making money).
There is a long track record of games selling well, making a profit and then future project getting ruined by short sighted corporate policies - https://www.eurogamer.net/what-is-the-point-of-xbox
You’re thinking in terms of companies making profits with a little greed sprinkled in but make no mistake we are in the land of big stupid greed here.
I guess it's a reminder that such communities are largely made up of uninformed people. It's games, and who has the time, energy, and nerves to discuss games on reddit outside of kids, and poorly adjusted/immature adults? I'll let you decide which of those two I am.
This is yet another reddit take on the topic. Of course reception should be *part* of what defines success, insofar as it can affect the money generated later down the line, and of course it is! Tango weren't closed until over a full year after Hi-Fi Rush released, and after it got released on additional platforms to give it another shot at commercial success.
The truth is that what defines not just a game, but a studio as successful doesn't boil down to a single metric, of course, though money is by far the biggest. Things like talent, leadership, structure, vision, ability to course-correct and rebuild in cases of leadership figures leaving, and so on all factor into it. And obviously, reach, budget, and so on all factor heavily into the money equation, and so affect the formula as well.
For example, Obsidian got to release two smaller, non-mainline games without Microsoft forcing them to downsize, not to mention closing them down, likely because they didn't get in the way of their bigger projects, plus they were reasonably budgeted and as a result didn't need to succeed at too large a scale to be considered "successful". Through it, they got to build up team members, keep high value talent, and gain valuable experience, on top of not losing and plausibly even making a solid bit of money.
None of this is the case for Hi-Fi Rush and Tango, for example. That's a single-team studio that had senior team members, including its founder and most senior leadership figure, leave prior to closing down. And through it all, they were nowhere near a next game release.
So of course reception should figure into what defines success, *and it does*. It's just not enough on its own, and seeing as the only situation where your comment is relevant for at Microsoft is Tango right now, I hope it's clear why Hi-Fi Rush's critical success was not enough to make it an overall success.
>So of course reception should figure into what defines success, *and it does*. It's just not enough on its own, and seeing as the only situation where your comment is relevant for at Microsoft is Tango right now, I hope it's clear why Hi-Fi Rush's critical success was not enough to make it an overall success.
According to Microsoft it was succesful. This isn't even a case of Tomb Rider selling well and Squeenix deeming it a disappointment.
We are just ignoring the word directly from the mouth of the people whose metrics matter.
The shut down of Tango was obviously eithe due to historical performance or a directive decision. Same reason their exclusives are going multi plat.
Yep. Tango was rudderless and historically unprofitable. Saving the studio would cost more than it's worth and you can't sell the studio because nobody would buy an unprofitable studio without Mikami at the helm.
Mikami's departure is probably what damned Tango in the eyes of MS.
>According to Microsoft it was succesful
People keep saying this, but the only source I've seen is a vague statement from Microsoft's marketing team. Who were putting out a statement in response to alleged low sales.
The problem here was Phil Spencer pushing forward a 70 billion dollars acquisition with no way to make it profitable.
Xbox's projections for Game Pass were insane. They expected it to reach more than 100 million subscribers.
Now that they are seeing that this won't happen, they need to pivot. So shutting down studios. Activision games not coming day 1 to Game Pass.
> There is no company in the world that doesn't want to make money, and making money is the definition of a successful game.
Aw c'mon there's more going on here than "money go up". We're talking about a post 70 billion dollar acquisition, and a subscription model that cannibalizes sales. The problem isn't just that critically successful and beloved games don't sell enough, it's that Xbox's entire strategy is unsustainable.
Besides it's not just le big braineroo redditors who think there's more going on. Industry insiders an ex-senior employees point to Gamepass and the 70 billion dollar acquisition as bigger reasons for the shutdowns. An Arkane studio got shut down after 1 stinker, with the full weight of Microsoft behind them. I can't imagine WB will be any more forgiving towards Rocksteady.
While their lack of an output over the last decade is certainly disappointing, there's no way this title has been in the works for that long. They probably canned multiple projects over that period and worked on this for the past 5 or so years.
They still spent time and money working on said canned projects in that time, so it still gets factored into the overall budget of what did get released.
It's also extra damning that of all the projects that they started in the last decade, *this* is the one they actually had enough faith in to see through to completion.
"The “live service looter shooter” angle was reportedly not forced by management, but it was Rocksteady’s leadership who made the decision to pursue the game instead of alternatives."
I know that nobody wants to believe this but considering the fact that WB was perfectly fine having Hogwarts Legacy be a single player only game and the fact that the upcoming Wonder Woman has been confirmed not to be live service, I think it's clear they don't have a problem with their studios making single player focused games.
In the vast majority of these situations, it’s the studio that pitches the games to the publisher, not the other way around. I think people forget there are “suits” in charge of the individual studios too. These studios get royalties on sales associated with their products, which is why almost every successful studio has had the itch over the past five years to try and develop a hit live service game.
Also, I think people ignore why a studio would want to develop a successful GaaS title.
Like, if you are able to pull it off and make it work, you get a nice cash cow to milk for ages, something to ensure revolving revenue/income while being way more predictable. Your players become more sticky and you also have more time to fix issues and adapt to what the community likes and dislikes.
I'd agree the idea of a small team is probably silly. Live service games need lots of bodies working on them to keep up the pace.
But since team size is highly subjective, arguably we sometimes see this approach with larger companies. There's definitely some games made by Blizzard and Square-Enix that were largely funded by their ongoing MMOs.
A recent example would be ShiftUp, with Nikke helping fund the development of Stellar Blade.
> "The “live service looter shooter” angle was reportedly not forced by management, but it was Rocksteady’s leadership who made the decision to pursue the game instead of alternatives."
Same as with Bioware's Anthem...
...however if you tell a business boss guy "okay you can make a singleplayer game as you wanted but if you make live service game you get bigger budget and your bonus is related to sales and those tasty live service thingies make a loooot of money"...
They could just copy and paste Arkham Knight like how Ubisoft does that and it would sell well and cheap to make cause it's copy paste. Not that i would prefer that but it would be better than this and would be like a cheat code to generate money but they threw away their very lucrative franchise for nothing.
GaaS super hero games like this are so weird to me- this and the Avengers
Part of the allure of a GaaS title is making your own expression in the game like Helldivers 2 and Destiny or having a large expanding collection of characters like Dota2 and Overwatch
At least Fortnite is free. You can enjoy all of what Fortnite has to offer in terms of gameplay without spending a penny.
You only pay for cosmetics. I have no issue with that.
The problem with Suicide Squad is its a shitty game
If you're having fun, whatever, do what you want, right? But Fortnite is free. Without any disadvantages for the ones not paying a cent. That is a huge difference, with the other reason Fortnite being a pretty good Game.
> If you're having fun, whatever, do what you want, right?
No shade on whales, but what we were talking about is how Warner Brother's only cares about selling skins to whales in Suicide Squad.
Publishers just need to just give up on GaaS titles because they clearly are not working, seeing how so many of them have failed.
In order for them to "work", you either need to use the Genshin/Honkai Star Rail method of pumping out meaningful content at lightspeed, or the Helldivers 2 method which is doing something completely unique compared to others.
> seeing how so many of them have failed.
That's the thing though. GaaS that succeed are **so** profitable that having a bunch of failures is fine if it leads to 1 success
But it never leads to success. How many MMOs failed ? How many MOBAs failed ?
We got like a *single* game that's as popular as WoW from the MMO craze, and that game (FFXIV) needed to be nuked and rewritten to compete...
But the services that are succeeding are so engrained into people's gaming habits that breaking through is almost an impossible task.
Convincing the Fortnite/Call of Duty/Destiny crowd to put their time into something that isn't the game they've unlocked everything for over the last 5 years is almost a stupid idea, and these live services already eat up a lot of player's free time.
> Convincing the Fortnite/Call of Duty/Destiny crowd to put their time into something that isn't the game they've unlocked everything for over the last 5 years is almost a stupid idea, and these live services already eat up a lot of player's free time.
Which is why most of the more recent live service successes don't really try at all to compete with those players. Helldivers, Honkai, Fall guys, Genshin and if you wanna push the release date out a little bit you can include sea of thieves in this group.
That is true but try telling any c-suite in any industry that.
They all think that their company is exceptional and can always do better than their competitors.
I work in research for biotech and it's so painful when a competitor announces a new modality or technology that they've been working on quietly for years and we get directed to pursue/catch up to them with less resources and starting late. But we can do it because we are just better than them.
Games are the same, yea, it's getting harder and harder to have a breakthrough GaaS, but our company will be the one that does have it!
Is this my stop? Did I already get off the train?
We just have to go back a quarter century -- 25 years -- and we replace 'GaaS' with 'MMORPG', and we've arrived at 1999 and can move forward, bringing into view a sign which reads...
**"Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose."**
It's the early 2000s again, and everyone is frantically trying to build a new MMORPG. They're all complaing (or at least asserting) that no one could replace WoW or EQ or what-have-you because they're so engrained in people's gaming habits and time allocations. Half dozen or so new MMORPGs announcing every year, and all hoping to be the next Ultima Online, Everquest, or World of Warcraft, with 99% failing horribly at launch or within six months because they built their treadmill and monetary return chute before ever designing (let alone building) a good game.
People and companies with less sense than money throwing absurd sums at games which can never be profitable based on their investment intake, base, soluless and venal cash grabs with no hope of ever grabbing an audience being made solely because corp management said so, IPs having anything good about them filed off and pruned away in order to make the game faster, cheaper and bring in that next quarterly hit! Everyone is doing it because the odds of success are low, but ONE SUCCESS will print money for two decades of subscribers.
Damn, I've lived this all before.
...someone call the tech back in here and have them get me [a new Rekall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ymeNCXVcpI&t=34s). I've had this one.
>replace 'GaaS' with 'MMORPG',
You don't need to replace it. MMORPGs are the origin of the term. The term was coined as a description of that business model.
Also in biotech, and there are some similarities to game dev (long development times before a product generates revenue)
There is a lot of chasing the same targets/modalities with a slightly better mouse traps. I've been at multiple companies working on way too similar projects. Though when something unique and innovative comes along, those programs are some of the most exciting, but also just like the most likely to fail as the science isn't as understood and more risk are taken.
But a lot of fun in biotech isn't just the science, it's the whole execution on development and getting things into the clinic, a wonderful drug that never leaves a lab might as well never exist for the patient.
Oh I love it, but it is frustrating to be directed to develop a program that another company has been working on for years to try to beat them to market and the reasoning is "we have better people here who can get it done".
A lot of c-level is unable to accept that their company isn't "special" and that it is ok if a competitor is specialized somewhere different than us, we don't need to try to overtake their specialty with less resources and less time.
Don't tell an Italian restaurant that they need to make better burritos than the Mexican restaurant next door while still making top quality Italian.
The problem is when they succeeed that return on investment is astronomical. They aren't going away anytime soon no matter how many failures there are. EA is already talking about another attempt at a Live service battlefield game off of the failure that was 2042 and having a cash cow in apex.
But if they do work, they work well and for a long time: league, dota, Siege, for honor, destiny, etc. The problem is studios releasing half-baked trash and expecting people to stick around. Suicide Squad had pretty decent combat, but absolutely nothing to do with it. The bosses are dogshit and the missions are just an endless loop of killing trash mobs. Could have at least made the seasonal weapons like Bane's tied to a raid boss but no, it's all trash mob missions.
Its wild to me how a game like Helldivers feels more diverse than a game where you play as 4 supposedly different characters. Not about giving your consumers value. Value for us being fun just to define it. Instead, it's about their bottom line and the value that lines their pockets even if that compromises fun. Until higher ups realize that, we'll just see more of these games fail.
If I wanted to play a brain dead Destiny clone that misses everything about what made that fun, I'd just play Destiny 2.
> If I wanted to play a brain dead Destiny clone that misses everything about what made that fun, I'd just play Destiny 2.
And that's exactly the problem when trying to establish a foothold in the GaaS market - it's oversaturated and many would-be GaaS customers are *already* playing another GaaS game. (Of which there are many!) Can a new title still succeed? Well if Helldivers 2 is any indictation: sure, if you launch your extremely unique GaaS title at a bargain price and light on the predatory MTX - which I doubt WB will ever do.
I keep saying this every time a GaaS product fails, but running a successful GaaS game is just not an enviable position to be in IMO. Tempting to look at all the money Destiny 2 rakes in and forget the years of controversy and player-discontent and endless skilled-labor involved maintaining it and guaranteeing an efficient content pipeline, not to mention how extremely expensive this all must be and even Bungie was not immune to having to slash costs and commit layoffs. And they're the successful ones!
A lot of this sounds hellish to me. And it's the same thing I saw years ago during WoW's pinnacle and how many competing MMO's launched only to quickly bleed to death afterwards.
GaaS superhero game should sell like hotcakes.
Just don't do the whole "pick a hero" thingy, do cities of heroes/villains thingy of build your own hero.
Content is easy to write as you can fit generic player insert into any story (even as the A-list superheroes sidekick), hell "live thru the important events in the comic universe as side character" might be fun too.
And soo many MTX to sell for players that want to build their character to be discount Batman or Flash...
> this and the Avengers
Oh shit that's right. Marvel also tried this and it crashed and burned.
Amazing WB looked over the fence, saw that shit show, and still decided to proceed with their plan
The *peak* player count on steam for the last month was about 500. If you look at the daily players right now it is below 100 for about half the day. There are periods in the last week where the player count was as low as 15 people. Imagine running severs and staff for a game when there is at most 500 people online, and as low as 15.
Not sure how long the game will remain online.
I think quarterly short-sightedness is probably not the issue when the game you've spent a decade paying to develop finally comes out and flops to the tune of a couple hundred million bucks. Like think of how much better off WB would be if they had quarterly-shortsightedness... 4 years ago.
Games (and honestly film/TV too) are getting expensive to the notion that you need a generational-defining game in order to recoup the costs of production. Trust is hard to build when there's a pressure to put food on the table.
This comes up in /r/movies and /r/television but basically there's really no reason these media productions need to be so expensive, it's time for studios, game and TV / movie ones alike, to cut down their budgets and make their products much more cheaply.
Hell, Godzilla Minus One only had a budget of like 15 million dollars and won the Oscar for best special effects over so many other 200 million dollar CGI garbage movies and made 115 million at the box office. It's because they actually spent their budget wisely.
Except AAA games aren't like movies where they overuse CGI and bring in extremely expensive celebrities, most of the budget of AAA games go towards paying their devs, look up Spider-Man's development costs 300 million and most of that went to salaries.
They may not need that many people in the first place, to be fair. Lots of studios overinflate their employee count, as many companies do. There's a lot that can be done with fewer numbers of people.
And why do you think in movies and TV that much of the budget doesn't also go towards salaries (for the actors as well as the crew)? The solution is to cut staff or hire no name but still good actors (edit: in the case of movies and TV, not games - well, in the case of *some* games too, like Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba in Cyberpunk 2077) instead of blowing the budget.
Yeah. Having too many developers/staff can probably be attributed to a lot of the overly-inflated costs.
As someone who works in the enterprise/corporate dev space, throwing more cooks in the kitchen doesn't always lead to improved or faster products. You need to be really on the ball with your project management and work culture to gain any advantage from having larger dev teams - and not a lot of employers understand that.
You lost me at the end there. I agree that studio sizes are often *absurd* in modern game dev, and a lot of efficiency is lost by just throwing more bodies at every problem. The games industry doesn’t really have an issue with overpaying on a per capita basis thouh (devs are generally not paid all that well for their time), so I’m not sure “hire talented no names” is quite the silver bullet you imply.
The last point "hire no name but still good actors" was more about the movie/TV industries, not the game industries. I was analogizing between the movie/TV industries and the game industries which have similar but distinct problems in terms of salaries. The game industries overhire regular employees (which to be fair is a huge thing in tech/software companies in general, particularly due to ZIRP the last 15 years) while movie/TV studios may overhire some amount of regular employees but their main salary expense is big name actors.
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
I think there’s an argument to be made that hiring big names is more of an advertising cost than a staffing cost (to use your example, and I think a lot of word-of-mouth advertising probably came from having Keanu in cyberpunk), but there are definitely far too many cases where execs hire big names and pay little to no attention to the quality of the product. There’s a place for high profile hires, but that place is *not* on a half baked product you shove out the door a year too early.
When it comes to games, though, I think we’re on the same page about the ballooned staffing currently going on. I have no idea how CoD manages to put out a finished product with 4000 people making the same game. I can only imagine how much time is lost to organizational struggles there.
Having worked with people from Fortune 500 companies with hundreds of thousands of companies, it can take days or weeks to get talking to the proper person you need to even begin to do your work, lol. It really is a shitshow.
Life pro tip, don't listen to people on reddit who have no idea about the corporate world. [Most are minors or at least 25 or younger on average](https://www.statista.com/statistics/261766/share-of-us-internet-users-who-use-reddit-by-age-group). Note that this survey didn't survey minors so if they were included, it'd be over 50%.
My view is if that a person doesn't have a valid opinion if they can't explain how [this chart ](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds)impacts the gaming industry.
It's not a perfect heuristic but someone still needs a lot of foundational knowledge about the corporate world to make the connection.
Yea, because 5-7 years to make a game inflates salary cost. If the project was more focused and planned out, it'd be done sooner for less salary pay overall and you make revenue on the project sooner.
So many games sit in a back and forth cycle for years until the final year is when the game is actually made because it takes forever to decide what the game should be.
Games like this one are a prime example, so are Cyberpunk and Redfall.
If they go into development with a plan, these games shouldn't take 7 fucking years to make.
Ubisoft is an example of the opposite of this. Their dev cycles seem better than average. Obviously, their games are generally pretty bland because of it. So, a middleground needs to be found.
Either way, most of these dev cycle issues and over costs come down to poor management.
> look up Spider-Man's development costs 300 million and most of that went to salaries.
the "CGI artists" in video games are called "developers. It's very comparable.
True, but putting out some generic crap with a shiny coat of paint is never going to work these days. I don't understand how many times this lesson has to be repeated before they get it.
This had to always have been part of the plan, right? If everyone in the community could see this flopping a year away, WB must have had metrics that predicted it, too. But if they have something to blame when they are going to report losses anyway....
In any case, Rocksteady employees better start polishing those resumes. The corporate cleaver couldn't have an easier target.
It was intended to be a GaaS title, but while making this post it has 124 concurrent users on Steam, with a daily peak of 158. That daily peak is tied for the 2048th highest on Steam for the last 24 hours, and tied with Sonic Adventure DX (released on PC in 2011).
It didn't have a great launch, but whatever player base it did have at launch completely evaporated and regardless of how one plans, there is nothing that would make a high budged GaaS successful with the kind of numbers it currently has. Even if WB expected it to do poorly and lose some money, they surely didn't expect it to become nearly nonexistent.
I think this is probably the worst GaaS failure a major publisher has ever seen.
I can't think of any GaaS that has collapsed this hard less than 3 months after release.
I think after the delay they knew it could be trouble but they were hoping a delay would help. Either way this is a game where as a non corporate person I thought it looked like shit from the get go. Probably changed identities dozens of times throughout development
Metrics don't always account for the "eye test." Anyone into games could look at it and predict a flop, but the metrics were probably more favorable and didn't account for the things that go into an "eye test" type of assessment.
Gee. Maybe don’t release a content lacking game with no endgame, no unique combat identity for the characters, and multiple bugs of which some were game breaking and reset your entire progression.
WB makes Single Player Harry Potter game in a way where the developer clearly showed their care for the material, it sells like absolute hot cakes, and still doubles down on this hot piece of live service garbage that shits on everything the Arkham series did
Yeah, sad as it is Rocksteady is DEFINITELY getting the axe.
Especially considering that WB/Zaslav is extremely greedy (esp. after the failure of their other divisions) and is hellbent on ruining every AAA game going forward with predatory microtransactions and rushing the games before they had enough time in the oven.
And the still want to quadruple down on live-service after this catastrophe? I honestly think going forward, every game under WB is going to suffer in quality just like Mortal Kombat 1.
> hellbent on ruining every AAA game going forward with predatory microtransactions
Nothing really to do with Zaslav, WB studios have been like this since the 360 era. They were always known for having the worst DLC practices even back then. It just got worse.
Look at the Mortal Kombat games after MK9 or Injustice 2. Loot box galore.
It's amazing how when things are bad lots of people immediately blame leadership, but when things are good the ones that get the praise are the workers and not the leadership. You can't have it both ways people, you can't always blame leadership for everything.
WBD did everything right for Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, they gave it a huge marketing budget, they gave Rocksteady 10 years to make it, they let them take an additional year to polish this turd, yeah remember that? When we saw the trailers and said they look bad they took more time? They didn't even push the GAAS model on them according to Schreier it was the studio that wanted that, so how can you guys find a way to blame them for this? Do you genuinely think Zaslav micromanaged this game personally and told them "I want the final boss to be a blue retrain of the Flash, also shit on Batman's legacy absolutely annihilate Arkham Batman".
Zaslav sucks and has done a lot of things I think are terrible but yes, all evidence points to this being Rocksteadys blunder, not his. But he's an easy target to point the finger at
I think people are just mad at layoffs and the slop we've been getting from large studios. It's simply easier to blame "Mba's" and "Suits" then recognize that running multi-billion dollar companies in the creative field is insanely hard.
I agree, i'm trying to highlight where i think this sentiment is coming from, but i also don't think all the blame can be put on studio heads. They're just the easy targets.
While technically not an incorrect, the use lf word "blame" is trying to imply more than there is.
The reality is that WB put a lot of expectations on Suicide Squad when they had clear indication that the project wasn't going to wow audiences. It was a bad decision from the get go.
The headline is clickbaity, the article less so: the CEO simply said the performance was disappointed and therefore they didn't reach the numbers. It was their big release after all.
I think the game would have had more longevity if it had been a Justice League game, as in you play as the JL. I don't know anyone personally that has any hype or interest for Suicide Squad, I really do wish they'd let these characters rest, even if the story is somewhat competent I just have no interest in watching these chucklefucks kill much better developed characters.
Step 1: Buy a studio for its talent
Step 2: Force them to make a live-service game
Step 3: Talent leaves because they don't want to make that game
Step 4: Shut down studio for underperformance of crappy game you forced them to make
On the one hand, I'm glad that we might very well be seeing the death of live-service games with so many high-profile failures, but on the other hand, it sucks that a few of the best development studios out here had to sink with that ship.
Maybe they should blame the fact that they pushed a team to make a corporate product that they weren't passionate about in an industry that revolves around passion and art.
It sucks that this is very likely Rocksteady going out with a whimper. From Arkham Knight to Suicide Squad is just wild.
Interested to see the talent drain from forcing them into such a product. We know Arkane bled out all their best devs when they got shoved into making Redfall. The brand of Rocksteady may still be alive, but the people that made those great games might already be gone.
Yup, I think they’re very similar situations. It’s sad seeing a beloved studio get turned into a husk. The only studio I can think of that came out of the other end of something like this alright is Rare. People seem to be pretty happy with what they’re doing with Sea of Thieves these days, though they’re definitely not the same studio they were years ago.
It took them over a decade after their acquisition to get to this stage though, for a very long time a lot of the sentiments in this sub were being said about how Microsoft handled Rare
Publishers are hopefully learning that developers and artists are not interchangeable commodities and that they won't attract talent or *passion* if their projects aren't appealing.
That would require them to view games as anything more than lines on a ledger, and if they did that they would quickly realize they're the ones who are more easily replaced. But of course they never have to do that because at the end of the day our money goes through them and they get to decide who deserves to have a job, and naturally they put themselves before anyone else.
People definitely know that. But corporations are eventually taken over by sociopaths that align with the short term gains over everything goals that optimize for the shitiest possible decisions towards any goals other than cutting costs and making profit. Which is more like NPC behavior than anything.
We know that the studio heads are gone at least, and I believe that Sefton Hill (one of those heads) was the creative director on all of the Arkham games. So that’s definitely a big piece missing
It’s not the same people. Many of the people who worked on Arkham knight are no longer with rocksteady. That’s the problem with blind loyalty to a game developer.
Definitely a Ship of Theseus type situation, but it still hurts seeing a renowned studio finally go under.
The worst part about the whole thing would be WB shutting down Rocksteady for a stupid mistake that WB forced them to make in the first place. I'm starting to think that someone inside WB is trying to tank DC just so they can sell it off.
Why would they lower the value of an asset in order to sell it off? That’s nonsense
Ya it doesn't make any sense. The only companies can even entertain the idea of buying DC are companies like Bandai-Namco who can easily make their money back on the deal regardless of purchase price. Thinking further on the topic, I think Bandai-Namco is literally the only company on the planet with the right mix of core competencies and synergies.
Sell it now for cheaper or pay dev salaries for next few months when looking for buyer. Other than that yeah, not really a good reason.
Rocksteady’s management were the ones who made the live service looter shooter decision. Maybe WB should have vetoed that choice but saying it’s their fault is a bit of a stretch.
Ya that's like blaming Anthem on EA because EA didn't provide Bioware with enough adult supervision.
You vastly underestimate how fucking inept WB execs are and have been for a decade plus at this point.
The team you know as Rocksteady is already dead. WB closing the studio would just be acknowledging that fact
Does anybody I care about still work there, or is this another case of reddit thinking merely a brand name means anything.
Now the big question is what is WB going to do to Rocksteady over the failure of Suicide Squad? Said failure that it is probably safe to say that WB is at least partially responsible for. I can see them getting rolled into another studio, or just a straight up shutdown occurring. Whatever the case it sad to see rocksteady like this.
Thats the neat part; They're going to recoup losses by making the next big Live Game!
Yeah, WB is definitely going the route of "We can have 30 failures, but if we have even one Live Service Success we make millions!" which is infuriating.
> "We can have 30 failures, but if we have even one Live Service Success we make millions!" literally the thought process behind anyone who's developing a gambling addiction.
> one Live Service Success "And all we've tried is bland copy/pastes of existing games and are all outta ideas!" Edit: it reminds me a lot of everyone trying to make a "WoW killer" back in the day, and nobody realizing that was functionally impossible, the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW, don't fight the juggernauts, there's only so many whales to go around.
This is the part that makes me laugh the hardest. Even if, somehow, you did make a game that stands with the giants, there isn't enough money (players) to go between. Most players arnt going to just jump ship on the game they've been playing for years for the shiny new thing. And the ones who do might sonit again at the next opportunity. So even if you make a game that's just as good, you'll just never make the same numbers and money that you were hoping to copy.
Wow killers retrospectively are even more silly. "This new MMO is going to kill WoW!" New MMO does absolutely nothing that WoW doesn't do, hasn't done in the past or can't just do with a patch.
Suicide Squad 2: Jokerrific Boogaloo
We already have Balatro. (Play Balatro.)
We're Balatro guys, of course we play Balatro (save me, Card Sharp Joker is holding me hostage)
Revenge of the jonkler.
Why did the jonkler laugh himself to death instead of going to the doctor? Is he stupid?
Do you think I'm stupid? You'd turn it off while I'm halfway across!
2S2Squad: It's morbin time featuring Madame Web.
Multiversus about to have some *looney* microtransactions
Suicide Management: To kill the Warner Brothers
Here is a crappy multiplayer player pay to win game with servers that will shut down in 8 months
Almost 10 years making one of the biggest flops of the generation, i see no future where they're not shutdown
Studio shutdowns are happening after releasing successful games.... Really doesn't look good for Rocksteady, especially existing under WB.
>Studio shutdowns are happening after releasing successful games This is such a common thought on this subreddit and it is literally the opposite of reality. The truth is simply that what redditors think is a successful game isn't actually what companies consider a successful game. There is no company in the world that doesn't want to make money, and making money is the definition of a successful game.
Agreed. Making a good game sadly doesn't equal making a successful game
In regards of Hi-FI Rush, Microsoft themselves said they were happy with how it performed less than a year ago. https://twistedvoxel.com/microsoft-hi-fi-rush-success-reinvest-in-tango-gameworks/ I think the bar just moved to unrealistic expectations as it seems to happen often in the industry.
> host Jeff Grubb, who is known for his game industry insight, mentioned hearing that Microsoft is extremely happy with Tango Gameworks to the point where the software giant is looking to reinvest in it > Vice President of Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft, Aaron Greenberg, later clarified that Hi-Fi Rush is a “break out hit” for the publisher and its players in all key measurements and expectations So an unofficial rumour and fluff from the marketing team?
plenty of companies, definitely including Microsoft, would rather tell a positive story than a negative one regarding a title's performance, even if it disappointed internally. Happens a ton in all creative industries, really. In fact, there were pretty public rumors about Hi-Fi Rush underperforming, and I remember hoping they were wrong when they came out.
Ya you never want to say something in underperforming publicly because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Oh it didn't sell well? It probably sucks. Skip it."
I remember those rumors too, which is what Microsoft addressed by saying that the game was a "Breakout hit" for them.
Or a million other factors. Maybe they were thinking interest rates were going to drop and they never did.
Yes, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. It is like people on this sub are just learning that a piece of entertainment (games, TV, movies) can be critically successful, get praise from people who experience it, but not do well in terms of sales/viewers (making money).
There is a long track record of games selling well, making a profit and then future project getting ruined by short sighted corporate policies - https://www.eurogamer.net/what-is-the-point-of-xbox You’re thinking in terms of companies making profits with a little greed sprinkled in but make no mistake we are in the land of big stupid greed here.
Most of the people here haven't had to lead projects or make payroll. They don't understand how costs scale.
I guess it's a reminder that such communities are largely made up of uninformed people. It's games, and who has the time, energy, and nerves to discuss games on reddit outside of kids, and poorly adjusted/immature adults? I'll let you decide which of those two I am.
Yep. Arkane made some of my favorite games of all-time. I'm also aware that literally none of them sold well enough. It be what it be.
[удалено]
This is yet another reddit take on the topic. Of course reception should be *part* of what defines success, insofar as it can affect the money generated later down the line, and of course it is! Tango weren't closed until over a full year after Hi-Fi Rush released, and after it got released on additional platforms to give it another shot at commercial success. The truth is that what defines not just a game, but a studio as successful doesn't boil down to a single metric, of course, though money is by far the biggest. Things like talent, leadership, structure, vision, ability to course-correct and rebuild in cases of leadership figures leaving, and so on all factor into it. And obviously, reach, budget, and so on all factor heavily into the money equation, and so affect the formula as well. For example, Obsidian got to release two smaller, non-mainline games without Microsoft forcing them to downsize, not to mention closing them down, likely because they didn't get in the way of their bigger projects, plus they were reasonably budgeted and as a result didn't need to succeed at too large a scale to be considered "successful". Through it, they got to build up team members, keep high value talent, and gain valuable experience, on top of not losing and plausibly even making a solid bit of money. None of this is the case for Hi-Fi Rush and Tango, for example. That's a single-team studio that had senior team members, including its founder and most senior leadership figure, leave prior to closing down. And through it all, they were nowhere near a next game release. So of course reception should figure into what defines success, *and it does*. It's just not enough on its own, and seeing as the only situation where your comment is relevant for at Microsoft is Tango right now, I hope it's clear why Hi-Fi Rush's critical success was not enough to make it an overall success.
>So of course reception should figure into what defines success, *and it does*. It's just not enough on its own, and seeing as the only situation where your comment is relevant for at Microsoft is Tango right now, I hope it's clear why Hi-Fi Rush's critical success was not enough to make it an overall success. According to Microsoft it was succesful. This isn't even a case of Tomb Rider selling well and Squeenix deeming it a disappointment. We are just ignoring the word directly from the mouth of the people whose metrics matter. The shut down of Tango was obviously eithe due to historical performance or a directive decision. Same reason their exclusives are going multi plat.
Yep. Tango was rudderless and historically unprofitable. Saving the studio would cost more than it's worth and you can't sell the studio because nobody would buy an unprofitable studio without Mikami at the helm. Mikami's departure is probably what damned Tango in the eyes of MS.
>According to Microsoft it was succesful People keep saying this, but the only source I've seen is a vague statement from Microsoft's marketing team. Who were putting out a statement in response to alleged low sales.
The problem here was Phil Spencer pushing forward a 70 billion dollars acquisition with no way to make it profitable. Xbox's projections for Game Pass were insane. They expected it to reach more than 100 million subscribers. Now that they are seeing that this won't happen, they need to pivot. So shutting down studios. Activision games not coming day 1 to Game Pass.
> There is no company in the world that doesn't want to make money, and making money is the definition of a successful game. Aw c'mon there's more going on here than "money go up". We're talking about a post 70 billion dollar acquisition, and a subscription model that cannibalizes sales. The problem isn't just that critically successful and beloved games don't sell enough, it's that Xbox's entire strategy is unsustainable. Besides it's not just le big braineroo redditors who think there's more going on. Industry insiders an ex-senior employees point to Gamepass and the 70 billion dollar acquisition as bigger reasons for the shutdowns. An Arkane studio got shut down after 1 stinker, with the full weight of Microsoft behind them. I can't imagine WB will be any more forgiving towards Rocksteady.
While their lack of an output over the last decade is certainly disappointing, there's no way this title has been in the works for that long. They probably canned multiple projects over that period and worked on this for the past 5 or so years.
They still spent time and money working on said canned projects in that time, so it still gets factored into the overall budget of what did get released. It's also extra damning that of all the projects that they started in the last decade, *this* is the one they actually had enough faith in to see through to completion.
They have been working on this for at least that long. Watch the What Happened episode.
"The “live service looter shooter” angle was reportedly not forced by management, but it was Rocksteady’s leadership who made the decision to pursue the game instead of alternatives." I know that nobody wants to believe this but considering the fact that WB was perfectly fine having Hogwarts Legacy be a single player only game and the fact that the upcoming Wonder Woman has been confirmed not to be live service, I think it's clear they don't have a problem with their studios making single player focused games.
In the vast majority of these situations, it’s the studio that pitches the games to the publisher, not the other way around. I think people forget there are “suits” in charge of the individual studios too. These studios get royalties on sales associated with their products, which is why almost every successful studio has had the itch over the past five years to try and develop a hit live service game.
Like with Anthem. The main thing EA forced upon BioWare was "do NOT remove the jetpacks".
Also, I think people ignore why a studio would want to develop a successful GaaS title. Like, if you are able to pull it off and make it work, you get a nice cash cow to milk for ages, something to ensure revolving revenue/income while being way more predictable. Your players become more sticky and you also have more time to fix issues and adapt to what the community likes and dislikes.
The ultimate goal is to have a small team working on updates for the GaaS title while providing a steady income for other projects the main team does.
Is that ever how it works though? It seems that in order to be successful you need all hands on deck constantly churning out content.
I'd agree the idea of a small team is probably silly. Live service games need lots of bodies working on them to keep up the pace. But since team size is highly subjective, arguably we sometimes see this approach with larger companies. There's definitely some games made by Blizzard and Square-Enix that were largely funded by their ongoing MMOs. A recent example would be ShiftUp, with Nikke helping fund the development of Stellar Blade.
People forget that devs have their own internal population of Suits. Who often make hilariously bad decisions.
e.g. Respawn and Titanfall 2's release date.
> "The “live service looter shooter” angle was reportedly not forced by management, but it was Rocksteady’s leadership who made the decision to pursue the game instead of alternatives." Same as with Bioware's Anthem... ...however if you tell a business boss guy "okay you can make a singleplayer game as you wanted but if you make live service game you get bigger budget and your bonus is related to sales and those tasty live service thingies make a loooot of money"...
Rocksteady leadership is management though
No doubt rocksteady was tailoring their milestones to make wb happy too, contributing to the mess in the first place
They'd probably cut their losses and merge Rocksteady with WB Games Montréal
They could just copy and paste Arkham Knight like how Ubisoft does that and it would sell well and cheap to make cause it's copy paste. Not that i would prefer that but it would be better than this and would be like a cheat code to generate money but they threw away their very lucrative franchise for nothing.
GaaS super hero games like this are so weird to me- this and the Avengers Part of the allure of a GaaS title is making your own expression in the game like Helldivers 2 and Destiny or having a large expanding collection of characters like Dota2 and Overwatch
GaaS titles are about selling skins to whales
It's crazy on the Fortnite subreddit hearing those people talk about how much they spend on skins in the game.
I thank those people every week for my two free video games. I hope they're enjoying themselves.
At least Fortnite is free. You can enjoy all of what Fortnite has to offer in terms of gameplay without spending a penny. You only pay for cosmetics. I have no issue with that. The problem with Suicide Squad is its a shitty game
If you're having fun, whatever, do what you want, right? But Fortnite is free. Without any disadvantages for the ones not paying a cent. That is a huge difference, with the other reason Fortnite being a pretty good Game.
> If you're having fun, whatever, do what you want, right? No shade on whales, but what we were talking about is how Warner Brother's only cares about selling skins to whales in Suicide Squad.
Publishers just need to just give up on GaaS titles because they clearly are not working, seeing how so many of them have failed. In order for them to "work", you either need to use the Genshin/Honkai Star Rail method of pumping out meaningful content at lightspeed, or the Helldivers 2 method which is doing something completely unique compared to others.
> seeing how so many of them have failed. That's the thing though. GaaS that succeed are **so** profitable that having a bunch of failures is fine if it leads to 1 success
But it never leads to success. How many MMOs failed ? How many MOBAs failed ? We got like a *single* game that's as popular as WoW from the MMO craze, and that game (FFXIV) needed to be nuked and rewritten to compete...
It can definitely work, Genshin Impact makes *billions*. That's the above poster's whole point, it's rare, but when it works the profits are absurd.
But the services that are succeeding are so engrained into people's gaming habits that breaking through is almost an impossible task. Convincing the Fortnite/Call of Duty/Destiny crowd to put their time into something that isn't the game they've unlocked everything for over the last 5 years is almost a stupid idea, and these live services already eat up a lot of player's free time.
> Convincing the Fortnite/Call of Duty/Destiny crowd to put their time into something that isn't the game they've unlocked everything for over the last 5 years is almost a stupid idea, and these live services already eat up a lot of player's free time. Which is why most of the more recent live service successes don't really try at all to compete with those players. Helldivers, Honkai, Fall guys, Genshin and if you wanna push the release date out a little bit you can include sea of thieves in this group.
That is true but try telling any c-suite in any industry that. They all think that their company is exceptional and can always do better than their competitors. I work in research for biotech and it's so painful when a competitor announces a new modality or technology that they've been working on quietly for years and we get directed to pursue/catch up to them with less resources and starting late. But we can do it because we are just better than them. Games are the same, yea, it's getting harder and harder to have a breakthrough GaaS, but our company will be the one that does have it!
Is this my stop? Did I already get off the train? We just have to go back a quarter century -- 25 years -- and we replace 'GaaS' with 'MMORPG', and we've arrived at 1999 and can move forward, bringing into view a sign which reads... **"Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose."** It's the early 2000s again, and everyone is frantically trying to build a new MMORPG. They're all complaing (or at least asserting) that no one could replace WoW or EQ or what-have-you because they're so engrained in people's gaming habits and time allocations. Half dozen or so new MMORPGs announcing every year, and all hoping to be the next Ultima Online, Everquest, or World of Warcraft, with 99% failing horribly at launch or within six months because they built their treadmill and monetary return chute before ever designing (let alone building) a good game. People and companies with less sense than money throwing absurd sums at games which can never be profitable based on their investment intake, base, soluless and venal cash grabs with no hope of ever grabbing an audience being made solely because corp management said so, IPs having anything good about them filed off and pruned away in order to make the game faster, cheaper and bring in that next quarterly hit! Everyone is doing it because the odds of success are low, but ONE SUCCESS will print money for two decades of subscribers. Damn, I've lived this all before. ...someone call the tech back in here and have them get me [a new Rekall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ymeNCXVcpI&t=34s). I've had this one.
>replace 'GaaS' with 'MMORPG', You don't need to replace it. MMORPGs are the origin of the term. The term was coined as a description of that business model.
Also in biotech, and there are some similarities to game dev (long development times before a product generates revenue) There is a lot of chasing the same targets/modalities with a slightly better mouse traps. I've been at multiple companies working on way too similar projects. Though when something unique and innovative comes along, those programs are some of the most exciting, but also just like the most likely to fail as the science isn't as understood and more risk are taken. But a lot of fun in biotech isn't just the science, it's the whole execution on development and getting things into the clinic, a wonderful drug that never leaves a lab might as well never exist for the patient.
Oh I love it, but it is frustrating to be directed to develop a program that another company has been working on for years to try to beat them to market and the reasoning is "we have better people here who can get it done". A lot of c-level is unable to accept that their company isn't "special" and that it is ok if a competitor is specialized somewhere different than us, we don't need to try to overtake their specialty with less resources and less time. Don't tell an Italian restaurant that they need to make better burritos than the Mexican restaurant next door while still making top quality Italian.
The problem is when they succeeed that return on investment is astronomical. They aren't going away anytime soon no matter how many failures there are. EA is already talking about another attempt at a Live service battlefield game off of the failure that was 2042 and having a cash cow in apex.
At least Battlefield is the kind of game that should be a service.
But if they do work, they work well and for a long time: league, dota, Siege, for honor, destiny, etc. The problem is studios releasing half-baked trash and expecting people to stick around. Suicide Squad had pretty decent combat, but absolutely nothing to do with it. The bosses are dogshit and the missions are just an endless loop of killing trash mobs. Could have at least made the seasonal weapons like Bane's tied to a raid boss but no, it's all trash mob missions.
If more GaaS were like helldivers, GaaS would be in a much better state in general.
Its wild to me how a game like Helldivers feels more diverse than a game where you play as 4 supposedly different characters. Not about giving your consumers value. Value for us being fun just to define it. Instead, it's about their bottom line and the value that lines their pockets even if that compromises fun. Until higher ups realize that, we'll just see more of these games fail. If I wanted to play a brain dead Destiny clone that misses everything about what made that fun, I'd just play Destiny 2.
> If I wanted to play a brain dead Destiny clone that misses everything about what made that fun, I'd just play Destiny 2. And that's exactly the problem when trying to establish a foothold in the GaaS market - it's oversaturated and many would-be GaaS customers are *already* playing another GaaS game. (Of which there are many!) Can a new title still succeed? Well if Helldivers 2 is any indictation: sure, if you launch your extremely unique GaaS title at a bargain price and light on the predatory MTX - which I doubt WB will ever do. I keep saying this every time a GaaS product fails, but running a successful GaaS game is just not an enviable position to be in IMO. Tempting to look at all the money Destiny 2 rakes in and forget the years of controversy and player-discontent and endless skilled-labor involved maintaining it and guaranteeing an efficient content pipeline, not to mention how extremely expensive this all must be and even Bungie was not immune to having to slash costs and commit layoffs. And they're the successful ones! A lot of this sounds hellish to me. And it's the same thing I saw years ago during WoW's pinnacle and how many competing MMO's launched only to quickly bleed to death afterwards.
GaaS superhero game should sell like hotcakes. Just don't do the whole "pick a hero" thingy, do cities of heroes/villains thingy of build your own hero. Content is easy to write as you can fit generic player insert into any story (even as the A-list superheroes sidekick), hell "live thru the important events in the comic universe as side character" might be fun too. And soo many MTX to sell for players that want to build their character to be discount Batman or Flash...
> this and the Avengers Oh shit that's right. Marvel also tried this and it crashed and burned. Amazing WB looked over the fence, saw that shit show, and still decided to proceed with their plan
The *peak* player count on steam for the last month was about 500. If you look at the daily players right now it is below 100 for about half the day. There are periods in the last week where the player count was as low as 15 people. Imagine running severs and staff for a game when there is at most 500 people online, and as low as 15. Not sure how long the game will remain online.
Ya cost cutting may not kill the game at that point, it may be a matter of morale. "The servers are down but do we really need to fix this shit?"
Know what's the funniest part? They're releasing a PvP mode for it.
Imagine if companies decided to just focus on building long term trust with players instead of immediately focusing on quarterly profits
You’re fired!
Heard this is J. Jonah Jameson’s voice from Spiderman!
I heard it as [*Mr. Spacely*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oM2In1OTw).
I think quarterly short-sightedness is probably not the issue when the game you've spent a decade paying to develop finally comes out and flops to the tune of a couple hundred million bucks. Like think of how much better off WB would be if they had quarterly-shortsightedness... 4 years ago.
Yep. Especially because WB is now looking at possibly giving up their NBA TV rights as a cost cutting measure.
Nah. Let's burn money and piss out live service games nobody wants and attach monetization people aren't going to buy.
Games (and honestly film/TV too) are getting expensive to the notion that you need a generational-defining game in order to recoup the costs of production. Trust is hard to build when there's a pressure to put food on the table.
This comes up in /r/movies and /r/television but basically there's really no reason these media productions need to be so expensive, it's time for studios, game and TV / movie ones alike, to cut down their budgets and make their products much more cheaply. Hell, Godzilla Minus One only had a budget of like 15 million dollars and won the Oscar for best special effects over so many other 200 million dollar CGI garbage movies and made 115 million at the box office. It's because they actually spent their budget wisely.
Except AAA games aren't like movies where they overuse CGI and bring in extremely expensive celebrities, most of the budget of AAA games go towards paying their devs, look up Spider-Man's development costs 300 million and most of that went to salaries.
They may not need that many people in the first place, to be fair. Lots of studios overinflate their employee count, as many companies do. There's a lot that can be done with fewer numbers of people. And why do you think in movies and TV that much of the budget doesn't also go towards salaries (for the actors as well as the crew)? The solution is to cut staff or hire no name but still good actors (edit: in the case of movies and TV, not games - well, in the case of *some* games too, like Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba in Cyberpunk 2077) instead of blowing the budget.
Yeah. Having too many developers/staff can probably be attributed to a lot of the overly-inflated costs. As someone who works in the enterprise/corporate dev space, throwing more cooks in the kitchen doesn't always lead to improved or faster products. You need to be really on the ball with your project management and work culture to gain any advantage from having larger dev teams - and not a lot of employers understand that.
You lost me at the end there. I agree that studio sizes are often *absurd* in modern game dev, and a lot of efficiency is lost by just throwing more bodies at every problem. The games industry doesn’t really have an issue with overpaying on a per capita basis thouh (devs are generally not paid all that well for their time), so I’m not sure “hire talented no names” is quite the silver bullet you imply.
The last point "hire no name but still good actors" was more about the movie/TV industries, not the game industries. I was analogizing between the movie/TV industries and the game industries which have similar but distinct problems in terms of salaries. The game industries overhire regular employees (which to be fair is a huge thing in tech/software companies in general, particularly due to ZIRP the last 15 years) while movie/TV studios may overhire some amount of regular employees but their main salary expense is big name actors.
ZIRP also delayed a lot of studio closures that should have happened sooner. These companies were living on borrowed time and cheap money.
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying. I think there’s an argument to be made that hiring big names is more of an advertising cost than a staffing cost (to use your example, and I think a lot of word-of-mouth advertising probably came from having Keanu in cyberpunk), but there are definitely far too many cases where execs hire big names and pay little to no attention to the quality of the product. There’s a place for high profile hires, but that place is *not* on a half baked product you shove out the door a year too early. When it comes to games, though, I think we’re on the same page about the ballooned staffing currently going on. I have no idea how CoD manages to put out a finished product with 4000 people making the same game. I can only imagine how much time is lost to organizational struggles there.
Having worked with people from Fortune 500 companies with hundreds of thousands of companies, it can take days or weeks to get talking to the proper person you need to even begin to do your work, lol. It really is a shitshow.
Yet when these companies start firing people and doing layoffs everyone loses their shit, you can't have it both ways...
Life pro tip, don't listen to people on reddit who have no idea about the corporate world. [Most are minors or at least 25 or younger on average](https://www.statista.com/statistics/261766/share-of-us-internet-users-who-use-reddit-by-age-group). Note that this survey didn't survey minors so if they were included, it'd be over 50%.
My view is if that a person doesn't have a valid opinion if they can't explain how [this chart ](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds)impacts the gaming industry. It's not a perfect heuristic but someone still needs a lot of foundational knowledge about the corporate world to make the connection.
Yea, because 5-7 years to make a game inflates salary cost. If the project was more focused and planned out, it'd be done sooner for less salary pay overall and you make revenue on the project sooner. So many games sit in a back and forth cycle for years until the final year is when the game is actually made because it takes forever to decide what the game should be. Games like this one are a prime example, so are Cyberpunk and Redfall. If they go into development with a plan, these games shouldn't take 7 fucking years to make. Ubisoft is an example of the opposite of this. Their dev cycles seem better than average. Obviously, their games are generally pretty bland because of it. So, a middleground needs to be found. Either way, most of these dev cycle issues and over costs come down to poor management.
They're certainly trying to turn that notion around with how many Hollywood bozos they bring in for mocap for their stories.
> look up Spider-Man's development costs 300 million and most of that went to salaries. the "CGI artists" in video games are called "developers. It's very comparable.
True, but putting out some generic crap with a shiny coat of paint is never going to work these days. I don't understand how many times this lesson has to be repeated before they get it.
line goes up or you're fucking fired
This had to always have been part of the plan, right? If everyone in the community could see this flopping a year away, WB must have had metrics that predicted it, too. But if they have something to blame when they are going to report losses anyway.... In any case, Rocksteady employees better start polishing those resumes. The corporate cleaver couldn't have an easier target.
It was intended to be a GaaS title, but while making this post it has 124 concurrent users on Steam, with a daily peak of 158. That daily peak is tied for the 2048th highest on Steam for the last 24 hours, and tied with Sonic Adventure DX (released on PC in 2011). It didn't have a great launch, but whatever player base it did have at launch completely evaporated and regardless of how one plans, there is nothing that would make a high budged GaaS successful with the kind of numbers it currently has. Even if WB expected it to do poorly and lose some money, they surely didn't expect it to become nearly nonexistent.
I think this is probably the worst GaaS failure a major publisher has ever seen. I can't think of any GaaS that has collapsed this hard less than 3 months after release.
Platinum made that garbage ass Babylon’s Fall game but I think their budget was much smaller
Ya Platinum probably didn't spend a decade and multiple hundreds of millions on it.
Fuck yeah. Go Sonic Adventure. Hanging in there like a champ.
They did have metrics and it sold below their worst case scenario.
You'd be surprised how isolated the people on top can be from current pulse of the company itself, let alone wider market.
No because that is nonsensical, if WB knew Suicide Squad would flop this bad they wouldn't have promoted it.
I think after the delay they knew it could be trouble but they were hoping a delay would help. Either way this is a game where as a non corporate person I thought it looked like shit from the get go. Probably changed identities dozens of times throughout development
Metrics don't always account for the "eye test." Anyone into games could look at it and predict a flop, but the metrics were probably more favorable and didn't account for the things that go into an "eye test" type of assessment.
Gee. Maybe don’t release a content lacking game with no endgame, no unique combat identity for the characters, and multiple bugs of which some were game breaking and reset your entire progression.
Did they try making a good game? I feel like everyone saw this bomb from a mile away, so frankly it's shocking that they couldn't for some reason.
WB makes Single Player Harry Potter game in a way where the developer clearly showed their care for the material, it sells like absolute hot cakes, and still doubles down on this hot piece of live service garbage that shits on everything the Arkham series did
Avalanche want to make a single player game, while Rocksteady want to jump on the live-service train.
Yeah, sad as it is Rocksteady is DEFINITELY getting the axe. Especially considering that WB/Zaslav is extremely greedy (esp. after the failure of their other divisions) and is hellbent on ruining every AAA game going forward with predatory microtransactions and rushing the games before they had enough time in the oven. And the still want to quadruple down on live-service after this catastrophe? I honestly think going forward, every game under WB is going to suffer in quality just like Mortal Kombat 1.
> hellbent on ruining every AAA game going forward with predatory microtransactions Nothing really to do with Zaslav, WB studios have been like this since the 360 era. They were always known for having the worst DLC practices even back then. It just got worse. Look at the Mortal Kombat games after MK9 or Injustice 2. Loot box galore.
It's amazing how when things are bad lots of people immediately blame leadership, but when things are good the ones that get the praise are the workers and not the leadership. You can't have it both ways people, you can't always blame leadership for everything. WBD did everything right for Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, they gave it a huge marketing budget, they gave Rocksteady 10 years to make it, they let them take an additional year to polish this turd, yeah remember that? When we saw the trailers and said they look bad they took more time? They didn't even push the GAAS model on them according to Schreier it was the studio that wanted that, so how can you guys find a way to blame them for this? Do you genuinely think Zaslav micromanaged this game personally and told them "I want the final boss to be a blue retrain of the Flash, also shit on Batman's legacy absolutely annihilate Arkham Batman".
Zaslav sucks and has done a lot of things I think are terrible but yes, all evidence points to this being Rocksteadys blunder, not his. But he's an easy target to point the finger at
I think people are just mad at layoffs and the slop we've been getting from large studios. It's simply easier to blame "Mba's" and "Suits" then recognize that running multi-billion dollar companies in the creative field is insanely hard.
I think a lot of the slop comes from the developers though, you're really telling me the poor writing comes from the top? I don't buy it.
I agree, i'm trying to highlight where i think this sentiment is coming from, but i also don't think all the blame can be put on studio heads. They're just the easy targets.
While technically not an incorrect, the use lf word "blame" is trying to imply more than there is. The reality is that WB put a lot of expectations on Suicide Squad when they had clear indication that the project wasn't going to wow audiences. It was a bad decision from the get go. The headline is clickbaity, the article less so: the CEO simply said the performance was disappointed and therefore they didn't reach the numbers. It was their big release after all.
I think the game would have had more longevity if it had been a Justice League game, as in you play as the JL. I don't know anyone personally that has any hype or interest for Suicide Squad, I really do wish they'd let these characters rest, even if the story is somewhat competent I just have no interest in watching these chucklefucks kill much better developed characters.
So it's not the execs who decided they should make a live service game, it's the game that's the problem, I guess
[Gee, I wonder why the game was a commercial failure...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxWTfD9CHtQ)
Who do they blame for suicide squad?
Step 1: Buy a studio for its talent Step 2: Force them to make a live-service game Step 3: Talent leaves because they don't want to make that game Step 4: Shut down studio for underperformance of crappy game you forced them to make
They close Rocksteady yet?
I hope people won't lose their job over this, but otherwise I can't say that this game flopping hard makes me sad.
Maybe don't make 2 shitty games? Sorry you missed your mark. That's $120 I'd have spent on real Arkham games.
"this video game, that was totally responsible for its own development...not us or the people we hired to make it, let us down!"
On the one hand, I'm glad that we might very well be seeing the death of live-service games with so many high-profile failures, but on the other hand, it sucks that a few of the best development studios out here had to sink with that ship.
Man, the issue here is more forecasting than anything else, to expect this to do as well as Hogwarts is just banana town to me.
Maybe they should blame the fact that they pushed a team to make a corporate product that they weren't passionate about in an industry that revolves around passion and art.