Rocksteady 7 years ago: "We dont want to make this." Early Reviewers 8 months ago: "You shouldnt have made this." Arkham fans 4 months ago: "You shouldnt have made this." Diehard fans 2 months ago: "You shouldnt have made this." Warner Bros: "Wot happened?"
@@emulationemperor8924 August I think, and it's definitely going to flop hard. Harder than Suicide Squad? We'll see, but that seems like a pretty good bet to make.
Unalive Crew: Decommission the diligence directotate Toaster Bathtub buddies: terminate the superfriends Self-Yeetus Deleetus congress: de-life the judiciary tournament ...coming up with alt names for this game is too much fun
Do tell. To be honest most people shouldn't have expected a Hogwarts Legacy success, which the opposite would be the real shameful outlook. Nobody at Rocksteady did the Arkham series when full development started on this game and it was never marketed as a Singleplayer game. Shameful for this year within the gaming industry has been named as MS already.
Gotta love hearing about “magic” being apart of the video game making process over and over and over and over again. Blizzard magic. BioWare magic. So on and so forth If I didn’t know any better, executives must think if they throw some underpaid contracted under their pillow at night, they’ll wake up to the whole bed being turned into a pile of money with some gold bricks and gemstones.
Of course, Redfall and Saints Row shows what happens when the execs are not involved in the process and kept in the loop too. A middle ground probably should be found in the process.
Studios: Games just take longer to make guys. Also studios: "I need you to rework and change this thing, and wait for approval for whatever gets implemented." I know this is one studio. But I am convinced there are so many bottlenecks in the industry that cause game development to take unnecessarily longer to make. I feel like indie and AA games are taking shorter to make based on their studio size compared to AAA studios that take forever for games that i guess have impressive graphics on the surface, but aren't fun.
That said, the new Saints Row had hands-off management approach and we all saw how badly it bombed. The Redfall execs point-blank lied to Microsoft execs in order to get their game out and we saw it bomb too. There needs to be a middle-ground somewhere.
@@TuramwddYep. Bad management is, well, bad. But so is a complete lack of direction. This is part of why _actually good_ management is worth a lot. Sadly it is far too easy for hucksters, egomaniacs, and people ruled by greed to "fake it" long enough to get handed that kind of power and responsibility.
This sounds like the Zenimax Redfall situation where Zenimax was misleading Microsoft by telling them that Redfall was doing great. Jason has also reported that Rocksteady's decision to make a live service game was not really a decision as they knew the WB executives would ONLY green light a live service game.
Are you sure? Redfall bombed while this sold well enough as Suicide Squad was 3rd on the NPDs for January and February. At the same time there were no lies on this project and was in production for 8 years.
@@Hydraclone That doesn't mean anything. Now it's a waste that 8 years was spent on the game, which Online games aren't cheap. Don't focus on the semantics especially when 2024 has been another huge and competitive year for games. Pretty much you're only mentioning one small part of the story opposed to the whole story.
I could have told them this well before it released. Its astoundingly easy for anyone outside of these companies to spot a massive flop well before they come out, so why the f do they keep releasing them? This industry is wild.
@@Toonrick12 Creative Assembly tends to listen to it's community, so (while CA makes MANY mistakes, Hyenas being one of several) it's easier for CA and Sega to can bad ideas before release
because they are told by others, that it will totally work, if they pay this outsourcer-company enough money to make it "attract a new audience". Sweet baby
I don't understand why management and execs say, "We're X Studio! It'll come together!" Like, what, the game is gonna make itself?? CDPR said that with Cyberpunk and it took 2 years to make that playable. Execs think their ideas are good the same way Elon thought the cybertruck was smart And people cant say WB didn't force them to make it live service. They _flew_ people to their studio to talk to them about it because we know how desperately they want to make it happen. Rocksteady probably would have been in trouble if they didn't "choose" to say yes. The founders leaving before it got rough was also super scummy
So how long do companies have to keep their "live service" games going to avoid getting sued for not making the game available long enough to not be called a scam?
Yeah, big thing is that these studios may not be 'ordered' to do these things, but you know the CEOs and other executives pretty much imply what they want. I also can see perfectionism ruining things as well, it did for Bioware and Blizzard.
Knowing you are holding up production with your own shortcomings and then just carrying on like there's no problem isn't perfectionism, it's simply bad management.
Its the equivalent of a steak house hiring a vegan activist to come in and change the menu to attract the vegans then being confused when the normal people who want steak say yeah this is shit I don't want to eat here
Funny how the restaurant business basically works for every analogy. :D But yeah, its complex, yet simple at the same time, easy to understand for everyone.,
No, that’s wrong. Rocksteady did not hire WB, and never wanted to make this game It’s more a steak house hiring a steak chef and asking them to lead the efforts of the new vegan menu
Time wasn't this games problem. They could have had 30 years and it never would have been a good game. I heard a lot about problems, but most those brought up don't really point back to the flaws that caused it to be a bad game.
Words like "Suicide" and "Kill" get a video automatically demonetized by the system. So you get "self-delete". Sometimes they will even get comments automatically removed too.
@@nhagan001 yes and they don't tell you, they pretend your comment was posted, it shows you posted it, but open the video on a different device without logging in and your comment will not be there. I also recently actively got a warning on my TH-cam home page about a comment of mine being removed for "violating our harassment policies" with a threat to "disable my account", and the worst part? They DON'T TELL YOU what comment was even deleted, or what the actual problem was, so you can't even act on their warning, it's nonsense. Google has 0 accountability, they treat their users like dirt.
@@XX-121The only aspects that SBI _might be_ responsible for are the changes to Harley's character and Deadshot's race, and there are other plausible explanations if you've actually followed WB/DC attentively over the last ten years. That gameplay, (enemy/mission) variety, and story are trash isn't some DEI conspiracy.
@@XX-121 Great games like Alan Wake 2, God of War Ragnarok, and Spider-man 2, are all on their resume. In fact Suicide Squad is literally the only notable bad game on their resume.
Isn’t this exactly what happened with Anthem? * It also took forever to make * they constantly changed the vision of the game during production (thet never really managed to lock down what they wanted the game to be) * it initially looked good in the very doctored previews that were released but gradually the cracks were begining to show. * it was released to thundering boos from the audience. * everyone initially blamed EA. * it was later revealed - by Jason Schreier - that modt of the dumb deciscions had come from Bioware upper management.
What surprised me a bit about the tone of the Bloomberg piece was how gamer-y it was. Is Warner Brothers loosing 200 million dollars on a product they were attempting to release into a $200 billion plus industry absolutely news for people who care a whole lot about how the business lines are wiggling? Absolutely. Would I expect an article by and for suits-and-the-suit-adjacent to just quote the phrase "looks like live service hell" without feeling the need to explain to the reader what kind of hell live service hell is? No, was not expecting that.
It's likely that it was greenlit way back before the Suicide Squad movie fell on it's face, but they stuck to it. It was probably always conceptualized as an Avengers style co-op team live service game, and carried the typical hallmarks of an expensive studio collecting paychecks for as long as possible. Then the real development hell was being forced to go back in the oven after the initial reveal backlash.
This reminds me of BioWare with Anthem. People are way too willing to blame everyone but the people who made the game. Developers see dollar signs too sometimes.
Since AAA companies can't make games that don't suck, it becomes a form of entertainment reading about the disasters like 'Unalive Squad..." It helps that the AAA game industry seems dominated by the greed of executives and investors constantly trying to push things that gamers don't want. I have really enjoyed disaster reports and follow ups, not to mention some reviews can be hilarious. Then there is the Sweet Baby, Inc. issue....
You do know that greed is dominated at every level in the Business World, right? You can't operate with the lights on without a continuous flow of money coming in. Every game is a gamble while a greater gamble is a Live Service game. If a Live Service game hits soft then you can make your money back but if it hits then you're making a lot of money. We saw these moves over many years between all of the MMOs and MOBAs that got released. What about the consulting? Don't listen to Mark Kern and the grifters. Most of the Live Service games come and go just like his former Firefall. Most of the controversy are from idiots and grifters since you playing the villains killing brainwashed heroes and the Fortnite inspired designs were never hidden throughout the 6 years of advertising on this game. This is a literal nothing burger like 99% of the game controversies that pop up.
I thought Sweet Baby Inc was not recruited until all of the cutscenes and their scripts were already made and that they were just consultants and not major story writers.
The absolute cowardice of Rocksteady leadership to agree to do a live service game that everyone knew was a bad idea, be entirely responsible for months and months of delays, wasted work, and unclear direction, and then bail on the company before the game released to universal derision?? Shameful, shameful behavior
Most "always online" games deserve to die. I have 6mbps down and 1mbps up, and my fibre is getting installed in the next few weeks. I will not support any of these games, even when I get good internet and actually could enjoy them (fk you payday 3 as well)
Lmao I swear 😂🤦🏾♂️ people need to stop being followers TH-cam doesn’t care about these types of words & now it’s spreading to social media because someone heard it
@@MrAjking808You're the one spreading disinformation in this case. If you don't rely on YT ad revenue, sure, you can say almost anything to your heart's content on TH-cam. But if you do, using "dangerous" words will see your livelihood plummet. That's simply a fact.
S*icide S*uad: K*ll T*e J*stice L*ague is the first AAA game in a long time (maybe ever) that not a single person in my friend circle(s) had any interest in. Usually there will be niche stuff like Cook Serve Delicious or some indie horror title that at least one person I know is hyped for. Massive game from well-established AAA studio built with high end graphics and a well-established IP (DC Comics): not a single person I know IRL or online was playing or had even slight interest in playing.
The marketing for it was honestly horrible for this game and did not give hope to be a good game etheir. Felt very uninspired even from the marketing side.
Skull and Bones looks fun at least. Suicide Squad looks like a chore. I still think it should have been a Justice League game like the Arkham franchise, and the Suicide Squad guys would have been in a side multiplayer mode with them fighting Black Mask or Twoface goons or something.
Time and time again, no matter how shitty a publisher is, the devs are also to blame for making bad games. Rocksteady is apparently trying to go back to its singleplayer roots with the next project pitch to WB. They wasted all that talent, time, and money making a doomed game, I'm surprised WB hasn't shuttered the studio.
devs are not to blame, they are people that want to have their job, love their job AND actually voiced concerns before most of us, if not all of us. The problem is with the higher management, which is now the higher management not in Rocksteady.
I definitly think the Unalive Squad franchise has potential to make money. The comics are entertaining and I believe the were well recieved. They should have just made it an action RPG 1 player game focusing on storyies from the comics or something
I love that they scrapped the car system, but also.. They kept the gunplay.. Wouldn't it be so much more Harley's fantasy to just swing around a massive hammer, or Hulk smash people as King Shark?
I wrote off the entire franchise when I heard how the first move was shot one way but because of the reaction from the trailer they hired music video directors and re made it in that style. Directionless focus group derived trash to make a buck from idiots.
Glad you realised before the refund limit passed. And that you got it on a platform that does refunds. I play alot on playstation and refuse to purchase anything unless I am certain I will either enjoy it, its massively discounted, or I wont regret supporting the company It has to be a massive disaster for sony to refund anything with their policy
Kinda shows how much of a myth the legendary auteur of creativity making masterpieces can be and WB clearly had no idea about what they were actually making LMAO Pretty sure the lay-offs will come in a couple of months
The stuff around Hill makes him seem kind of cowardly. When that pitch for a puzzle game didn't pass, he resorted to telling WB what it wanted to hear, despite saying more than once that they had to push against having multiplayer in Arkham. Instead of being there when the game finally went public, he left and the studio had a year of dealing with the mess. Now he went off and pushed reset by starting a new company with a new publisher.
The game industry right now is like the elementary school plays where everyone is included and it's cute to see everyone try. It just doesn't work as a business model
It’s a shame that Schrier’s report doesn’t go into more detail about the decision in Feb 23 to delay and what they did with that year. Because I could never see the difference between what was advertised in Feb 23 and what launched this year, and wonder whether they just pissed that year away to have a chance to restart the marketing campaign.
This is exactly what I have been commenting on months ago when everybody was shitting on the game and WB. And I didn’t have any whistleblower! But, reading many glassdoor reviews before the game was out, it was clear that Hill has the “little man syndrome” and the products they created were great, but at cost of hardship in the studio (“rocksteady magic”). I distinctively said: I bet you he made lots of this choices, the game was going nowhere and he left the ship to sink once whatever terms of the sale of the company had expired - timeline seems to line up with the generic information available about the sale.
It's something I've found interesting with developers players respect, like Rocksteady and Arkane, they assume the problem is the publisher forcing them to make a bad game without considering that the problem could be the developer itself. Making good games in the past doesn't make anyone immune to making a flop in the future. It could be an innocent mistake, it could be people in the studio trying to make ends meet or even just being greedy, it could be that the directors are just not interested in the games they used to make and try something new to catastrophic results. Don't get me wrong publishers can be very bad in their own right but I think we tend to put developers on a pedestal when the really are just people, just as capable of bad decisions as anyone else.
@BellularNews By the way, at 7:38, when you are talking about Jason Shreier's article, you didn't blur many instances of the K-word (you know what I mean). Just letting you know, hope your video doesn't get age restricted or something.
If they made a live service like payday where the game was about doing heists and making and escape when the justice league show up to hunt you down they could have probably pulled this off ...if it weren't for directionless managment
I really hope the industry learned their lesson that presenting us with an uninspired shell of a game that's mainly just a black hole meant for gamers to throw their money into will not succeed!
You know what's sad about all this, a multiplayer puzzle solving game would of kicked ass. Played through all the we were here games recentish and a puzzle game with a studio like rocksteady behind it could of been awesome.
I doubt Phil Spencer will ever say anything precise. He will give some generic recounts of problems, but not the juicy bits we want, or he would probably incur in some lawsuit and anyway would be very bad look for any future role. But I’m wondering if there’s any chance Todd Howard or Pete Hines will take his place after.
This "CULTURE OF PERFECTIONISM" is anything but that. It's a culture of SINGLE PASS, that take them away of perfectionism. Unlike the Arkham game that had multiple passes, improving the game at each one, Suicide Squad is clearly made on the first pass, after they TRIED TO PREDICT everything ahead to be "perfect at the first try".. That's why Arkham City looks like the recent game and Suicide Squad looks like the thing from 10 years ago. Culture of "did in a single try" is more precise than "perfectionism".
all skull and bones had to do was pull the assasins creed out of black flag and just leave the pirating with some multiplayer and more islands and legendary ships to plunder, and possibly a kraken 10 person raid boss
This article is bizarre. Hill had a major role in the success in the previous entries, but he's made all these amateur micromanaging mistakes for this one? That only makes sense if someone else was really holding the reins in the past had left.
I had a feeling a story like this would drop after reviews came out. No wonder SSKTJL sucks so bad. I would have loved to play the original version of this game, but I'm afraid that's lost to the sands of time and may never see a home computer or television screen. Thanks to everything that happened in the last five years, we're stuck with what we have, and I - a person who just wants to have fun playing a game - want no part of that.
Some of this makes little to no sense especially when all but 2 members of the Arkham team left 8 years ago, which was 2 years prior to the full development of this game. The 2 left when the game went into full development as in 6 years ago. As for sales. Hogwarts Legacy did amazing and no one predicted it just like Baldur's Gate 3. The Suicide Squad was 3rd on NPD for January and February in the middle of the Japanese game flood, which sold decently well. MK1 did sell well for a fighting game and wasn't even close to Hogwarts Legacy. MK1 did outsell all of the Fighting game competition in 2023. On the Hogwarts Legacy DLC. Its a Summer Update and the details on how big it is has yet to be reported. I doubt that it would be a major game update like Cyberpunk had last year.
I think at the time, a lot of these games were greenlit within years of each other. It seemed promising at the time of inception, but obviously, as more of these live service games released and failed, it was probably too late to turn things around, since the games take 6 to 7 years.
10:00 I wish that was something the devs over at CIG would learn regarding Star Citizen. That game is bloating out of control to the point where content that they slated to be delivered almost 5 years ago is just now on the horizon.
its frustrating when this came out as a disaster and everyone was putting all the blame on warner brothers because like yeah WB sucks ass and they are probably a big part of why this game is how it is, but I always felt like we would eventually learn that the blame largely lies with the former studio leadership who cut and run when their bad decisions didnt pan out, and well look at what we know now
Skull and Bones is doing decent numbers because they're letting people play it for free and selling it for half price. Whatever the numbers are now, it's as good as it will ever get.
At first glance the gameplay seems okay, too bad the bad traits of being a live service ruined the game. Maybe if it was more focus as a single player game it would've work
i understand having to self censer its just where we are at unfourtantly but it will never not irk me. when we have no real words left and everything is a guess where will we be
Join us at bellular.games for early access content, 20 editions of 'Loading Screen' a month and to support our team!
Rocksteady 7 years ago: "We dont want to make this."
Early Reviewers 8 months ago: "You shouldnt have made this."
Arkham fans 4 months ago: "You shouldnt have made this."
Diehard fans 2 months ago: "You shouldnt have made this."
Warner Bros: "Wot happened?"
Executives: "it's the player's fault"
The year's still young, we have a whole six months for something to flop even worse
When does Concord come out? Haha
@@emulationemperor8924 August I think, and it's definitely going to flop hard. Harder than Suicide Squad? We'll see, but that seems like a pretty good bet to make.
@@emulationemperor8924 Concord was exactly what I was thinking too
Concord must have the best gameplay to carry them otherwise us gamers will crucify that game as well
Its funny because its true we never even hear about these games until the month of release
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you! … Well, not that shocked
Is that a Futurama reference? Lol 😂
Millennial Reddit humor is one of the problems with the game, so I'm shocked you disliked it.
@@Yarsig care to cite an example of millennial reddit humor in the game that I should theoretically be into?
Unalive Crew: Decommission the diligence directotate
Toaster Bathtub buddies: terminate the superfriends
Self-Yeetus Deleetus congress: de-life the judiciary tournament
...coming up with alt names for this game is too much fun
😂😂👍👍
Forever Sleepers: Sandman The Good Guys
Hey, you're right!
A Superfriends-themed Suicide Squad game sounds significantly more interesting than what we got.
Rock Steady joins Bioware in the hall of shame.
XD
even worst... Arcane studios, I love those batman games. Ugh I wish Warner Bros would just let them make single player games
BioWare isn’t even bad
Do tell. To be honest most people shouldn't have expected a Hogwarts Legacy success, which the opposite would be the real shameful outlook. Nobody at Rocksteady did the Arkham series when full development started on this game and it was never marketed as a Singleplayer game. Shameful for this year within the gaming industry has been named as MS already.
Gotta love hearing about “magic” being apart of the video game making process over and over and over and over again. Blizzard magic. BioWare magic. So on and so forth
If I didn’t know any better, executives must think if they throw some underpaid contracted under their pillow at night, they’ll wake up to the whole bed being turned into a pile of money with some gold bricks and gemstones.
Of course, Redfall and Saints Row shows what happens when the execs are not involved in the process and kept in the loop too. A middle ground probably should be found in the process.
Studios: Games just take longer to make guys.
Also studios: "I need you to rework and change this thing, and wait for approval for whatever gets implemented."
I know this is one studio. But I am convinced there are so many bottlenecks in the industry that cause game development to take unnecessarily longer to make. I feel like indie and AA games are taking shorter to make based on their studio size compared to AAA studios that take forever for games that i guess have impressive graphics on the surface, but aren't fun.
I mean this also happened with Skull and Bones. And this isn't only happening now.
That said, the new Saints Row had hands-off management approach and we all saw how badly it bombed. The Redfall execs point-blank lied to Microsoft execs in order to get their game out and we saw it bomb too. There needs to be a middle-ground somewhere.
@@TuramwddYep. Bad management is, well, bad. But so is a complete lack of direction.
This is part of why _actually good_ management is worth a lot.
Sadly it is far too easy for hucksters, egomaniacs, and people ruled by greed to "fake it" long enough to get handed that kind of power and responsibility.
This sounds like the Zenimax Redfall situation where Zenimax was misleading Microsoft by telling them that Redfall was doing great.
Jason has also reported that Rocksteady's decision to make a live service game was not really a decision as they knew the WB executives would ONLY green light a live service game.
Are you sure? Redfall bombed while this sold well enough as Suicide Squad was 3rd on the NPDs for January and February. At the same time there were no lies on this project and was in production for 8 years.
@@chris9206 Still lost $200M. So it still very much bombed.
@@Hydraclone That doesn't mean anything. Now it's a waste that 8 years was spent on the game, which Online games aren't cheap. Don't focus on the semantics especially when 2024 has been another huge and competitive year for games. Pretty much you're only mentioning one small part of the story opposed to the whole story.
I could have told them this well before it released. Its astoundingly easy for anyone outside of these companies to spot a massive flop well before they come out, so why the f do they keep releasing them?
This industry is wild.
Because making a good game has become less important to too many studios.
At least Sega had half a brain to kill of Hyenas even if it was ready to launch.
WB is a spectacularly incompetent company.
@@Toonrick12 Creative Assembly tends to listen to it's community, so (while CA makes MANY mistakes, Hyenas being one of several) it's easier for CA and Sega to can bad ideas before release
because they are told by others, that it will totally work, if they pay this outsourcer-company enough money to make it "attract a new audience". Sweet baby
I don't understand why management and execs say, "We're X Studio! It'll come together!" Like, what, the game is gonna make itself?? CDPR said that with Cyberpunk and it took 2 years to make that playable. Execs think their ideas are good the same way Elon thought the cybertruck was smart
And people cant say WB didn't force them to make it live service. They _flew_ people to their studio to talk to them about it because we know how desperately they want to make it happen. Rocksteady probably would have been in trouble if they didn't "choose" to say yes. The founders leaving before it got rough was also super scummy
Something was super scummy!
Why would the FOUNDERS of a studio leave after known studio killer Sweet baby incorporated was hired by WB?🙄
Sounds like the exact same story as Anthem....and a few others
when you pivot, you shouldn't stand on your weakest leg
So how long do companies have to keep their "live service" games going to avoid getting sued for not making the game available long enough to not be called a scam?
When the line god becomes displeased and refuses any offerings to it.
Yeah, big thing is that these studios may not be 'ordered' to do these things, but you know the CEOs and other executives pretty much imply what they want. I also can see perfectionism ruining things as well, it did for Bioware and Blizzard.
Knowing you are holding up production with your own shortcomings and then just carrying on like there's no problem isn't perfectionism, it's simply bad management.
Also known as arrogance
Its the equivalent of a steak house hiring a vegan activist to come in and change the menu to attract the vegans then being confused when the normal people who want steak say yeah this is shit I don't want to eat here
Funny how the restaurant business basically works for every analogy. :D But yeah, its complex, yet simple at the same time, easy to understand for everyone.,
No, that’s wrong. Rocksteady did not hire WB, and never wanted to make this game
It’s more a steak house hiring a steak chef and asking them to lead the efforts of the new vegan menu
I don’t think Phil will ever give a frank interview. Knows how the C-suite game works.
Time wasn't this games problem. They could have had 30 years and it never would have been a good game. I heard a lot about problems, but most those brought up don't really point back to the flaws that caused it to be a bad game.
does youtube really force you to call it that? that's ridiculous
Words like "Suicide" and "Kill" get a video automatically demonetized by the system. So you get "self-delete". Sometimes they will even get comments automatically removed too.
Suicide, Kill -> PG 16/18
Demonitised
You can also get your comments “invisibled” with the wrong words.
@@nhagan001 yes and they don't tell you, they pretend your comment was posted, it shows you posted it, but open the video on a different device without logging in and your comment will not be there.
I also recently actively got a warning on my TH-cam home page about a comment of mine being removed for "violating our harassment policies" with a threat to "disable my account", and the worst part? They DON'T TELL YOU what comment was even deleted, or what the actual problem was, so you can't even act on their warning, it's nonsense. Google has 0 accountability, they treat their users like dirt.
@@nhagan001 I've noticed mines disappear....🙄
Yup 0.00% surprised by this
what that he still won't say the words "SWEET BABY"?
@@XX-121it's nothing burger. you're listening to the grifters like Mark Kern unlike the facts like Last Stand Media or Bellular.
@@XX-121The only aspects that SBI _might be_ responsible for are the changes to Harley's character and Deadshot's race, and there are other plausible explanations if you've actually followed WB/DC attentively over the last ten years. That gameplay, (enemy/mission) variety, and story are trash isn't some DEI conspiracy.
@@twincast2005 yeah being that every game they've been even remotely involved with has been utter garbage. just a coincidence i guess.
@@XX-121 Great games like Alan Wake 2, God of War Ragnarok, and Spider-man 2, are all on their resume. In fact Suicide Squad is literally the only notable bad game on their resume.
Hearing “Unalive Squad: Dispatch the Justice League” makes me want to [censored] myself.
Isn’t this exactly what happened with Anthem?
* It also took forever to make
* they constantly changed the vision of the game during production (thet never really managed to lock down what they wanted the game to be)
* it initially looked good in the very doctored previews that were released but gradually the cracks were begining to show.
* it was released to thundering boos from the audience.
* everyone initially blamed EA.
* it was later revealed - by Jason Schreier - that modt of the dumb deciscions had come from Bioware upper management.
It's ridiculous what social media is doing to language. Having to say unalive squad is so so dumb.
That is TH-cam automatic moderation and ad sales though and not social media in this case.
@@TrackMediaOnly what do you think youtube is...
Orwellian.
What surprised me a bit about the tone of the Bloomberg piece was how gamer-y it was.
Is Warner Brothers loosing 200 million dollars on a product they were attempting to release into a $200 billion plus industry absolutely news for people who care a whole lot about how the business lines are wiggling? Absolutely. Would I expect an article by and for suits-and-the-suit-adjacent to just quote the phrase "looks like live service hell" without feeling the need to explain to the reader what kind of hell live service hell is? No, was not expecting that.
Of course there won't be layoffs. They will just close the studio.
It's likely that it was greenlit way back before the Suicide Squad movie fell on it's face, but they stuck to it. It was probably always conceptualized as an Avengers style co-op team live service game, and carried the typical hallmarks of an expensive studio collecting paychecks for as long as possible. Then the real development hell was being forced to go back in the oven after the initial reveal backlash.
As a previous Moderater i hate to tell you "unalive" still flags for suicide check.
how is naming the game in the video worse than having it in the title?
We've never got got for title and thumbnail, but we have been got for video contents. I think they're two separate systems.
@@BellularNews praise to youtube's consistency 🤮
That is TH-cam for you.
another thing that is confusing is that you don't need to redact the word "kill" in the video when shown on screen but you apparently can't say it 🤨
Because TH-cam's policies are arbitrary nonsense.
This reminds me of BioWare with Anthem. People are way too willing to blame everyone but the people who made the game. Developers see dollar signs too sometimes.
Since AAA companies can't make games that don't suck, it becomes a form of entertainment reading about the disasters like 'Unalive Squad..." It helps that the AAA game industry seems dominated by the greed of executives and investors constantly trying to push things that gamers don't want. I have really enjoyed disaster reports and follow ups, not to mention some reviews can be hilarious. Then there is the Sweet Baby, Inc. issue....
You do know that greed is dominated at every level in the Business World, right? You can't operate with the lights on without a continuous flow of money coming in. Every game is a gamble while a greater gamble is a Live Service game. If a Live Service game hits soft then you can make your money back but if it hits then you're making a lot of money. We saw these moves over many years between all of the MMOs and MOBAs that got released.
What about the consulting? Don't listen to Mark Kern and the grifters. Most of the Live Service games come and go just like his former Firefall. Most of the controversy are from idiots and grifters since you playing the villains killing brainwashed heroes and the Fortnite inspired designs were never hidden throughout the 6 years of advertising on this game. This is a literal nothing burger like 99% of the game controversies that pop up.
I thought Sweet Baby Inc was not recruited until all of the cutscenes and their scripts were already made and that they were just consultants and not major story writers.
@@thomasalvarenga2839 if they had no impact than they were a waste of money....
The absolute cowardice of Rocksteady leadership to agree to do a live service game that everyone knew was a bad idea, be entirely responsible for months and months of delays, wasted work, and unclear direction, and then bail on the company before the game released to universal derision?? Shameful, shameful behavior
Most "always online" games deserve to die. I have 6mbps down and 1mbps up, and my fibre is getting installed in the next few weeks. I will not support any of these games, even when I get good internet and actually could enjoy them (fk you payday 3 as well)
How much is does 6/1 cost? I know it’s weird talking money in comments but I gotta know
“Unalive squad dispose the justice league”
Thanks TH-cam
At this point TH-cam ad revenue is like an insurance company. They're just looking for any excuse not to pay out
"Unalive Squad."
I never wanted to unalive myself more than now. 💀💀💀
Lmao I swear 😂🤦🏾♂️ people need to stop being followers TH-cam doesn’t care about these types of words & now it’s spreading to social media because someone heard it
@@MrAjking808 It's everywhere. I'm so tired of it.
@@Seoul_Soldier same people just copy whatever they see or hear
So that's Redfall's former team?
@@MrAjking808You're the one spreading disinformation in this case. If you don't rely on YT ad revenue, sure, you can say almost anything to your heart's content on TH-cam. But if you do, using "dangerous" words will see your livelihood plummet. That's simply a fact.
S*icide S*uad: K*ll T*e J*stice L*ague is the first AAA game in a long time (maybe ever) that not a single person in my friend circle(s) had any interest in. Usually there will be niche stuff like Cook Serve Delicious or some indie horror title that at least one person I know is hyped for. Massive game from well-established AAA studio built with high end graphics and a well-established IP (DC Comics): not a single person I know IRL or online was playing or had even slight interest in playing.
The marketing for it was honestly horrible for this game and did not give hope to be a good game etheir. Felt very uninspired even from the marketing side.
Skull and Bones looks fun at least. Suicide Squad looks like a chore. I still think it should have been a Justice League game like the Arkham franchise, and the Suicide Squad guys would have been in a side multiplayer mode with them fighting Black Mask or Twoface goons or something.
Both are incredibly bad
Time and time again, no matter how shitty a publisher is, the devs are also to blame for making bad games. Rocksteady is apparently trying to go back to its singleplayer roots with the next project pitch to WB. They wasted all that talent, time, and money making a doomed game, I'm surprised WB hasn't shuttered the studio.
devs are not to blame, they are people that want to have their job, love their job AND actually voiced concerns before most of us, if not all of us. The problem is with the higher management, which is now the higher management not in Rocksteady.
Sewer Slide Squad: Unalive the Justice Friends.
I definitly think the Unalive Squad franchise has potential to make money. The comics are entertaining and I believe the were well recieved. They should have just made it an action RPG 1 player game focusing on storyies from the comics or something
How to Kill a Studio
I love that they scrapped the car system, but also.. They kept the gunplay.. Wouldn't it be so much more Harley's fantasy to just swing around a massive hammer, or Hulk smash people as King Shark?
I wrote off the entire franchise when I heard how the first move was shot one way but because of the reaction from the trailer they hired music video directors and re made it in that style. Directionless focus group derived trash to make a buck from idiots.
one could argue that portal 2 is a multiplayer puzzle solving game
I bought the game on sale, I didn't even manage to get through the tutorial before I knew it wasn't what I wanted. Refunded immediately.
Glad you realised before the refund limit passed. And that you got it on a platform that does refunds.
I play alot on playstation and refuse to purchase anything unless I am certain I will either enjoy it, its massively discounted, or I wont regret supporting the company
It has to be a massive disaster for sony to refund anything with their policy
Kinda shows how much of a myth the legendary auteur of creativity making masterpieces can be and WB clearly had no idea about what they were actually making LMAO Pretty sure the lay-offs will come in a couple of months
Toaster bathtub squad cancels the life subscriptions of the justice league! 😂
The stuff around Hill makes him seem kind of cowardly. When that pitch for a puzzle game didn't pass, he resorted to telling WB what it wanted to hear, despite saying more than once that they had to push against having multiplayer in Arkham. Instead of being there when the game finally went public, he left and the studio had a year of dealing with the mess. Now he went off and pushed reset by starting a new company with a new publisher.
Suicide Squad's Development Was A MESS
In other news water is wet the sky is blue and I can't be bothered with punctuation right now
A $200 million dollar loss?
That’s justice for what they did to the DCEU.
The advertiser apocalypse was really just Google figuring out how to make YT profitable by keeping ad revenue from creators.
Hari-Kari Bunch : Conclude the Group seeking equitable outcomes
The game industry right now is like the elementary school plays where everyone is included and it's cute to see everyone try. It just doesn't work as a business model
It’s a shame that Schrier’s report doesn’t go into more detail about the decision in Feb 23 to delay and what they did with that year. Because I could never see the difference between what was advertised in Feb 23 and what launched this year, and wonder whether they just pissed that year away to have a chance to restart the marketing campaign.
This is exactly what I have been commenting on months ago when everybody was shitting on the game and WB. And I didn’t have any whistleblower! But, reading many glassdoor reviews before the game was out, it was clear that Hill has the “little man syndrome” and the products they created were great, but at cost of hardship in the studio (“rocksteady magic”). I distinctively said: I bet you he made lots of this choices, the game was going nowhere and he left the ship to sink once whatever terms of the sale of the company had expired - timeline seems to line up with the generic information available about the sale.
It's something I've found interesting with developers players respect, like Rocksteady and Arkane, they assume the problem is the publisher forcing them to make a bad game without considering that the problem could be the developer itself. Making good games in the past doesn't make anyone immune to making a flop in the future. It could be an innocent mistake, it could be people in the studio trying to make ends meet or even just being greedy, it could be that the directors are just not interested in the games they used to make and try something new to catastrophic results. Don't get me wrong publishers can be very bad in their own right but I think we tend to put developers on a pedestal when the really are just people, just as capable of bad decisions as anyone else.
A game director admitting they haven't played their direct competitors - wow, can't believe he failed to create a good game.
I don't think we're getting live service flops enought. We need more.
MORE!
@BellularNews By the way, at 7:38, when you are talking about Jason Shreier's article, you didn't blur many instances of the K-word (you know what I mean). Just letting you know, hope your video doesn't get age restricted or something.
If they made a live service like payday where the game was about doing heists and making and escape when the justice league show up to hunt you down they could have probably pulled this off
...if it weren't for directionless managment
An update from the Department of Things We Already Knew, huh? :D
the crime was the work that went in to the characters for such a crap game
I've seen some videos using the games proper name in their title having an unalive helpline added into the context BS youtube added.
I really hope the industry learned their lesson that presenting us with an uninspired shell of a game that's mainly just a black hole meant for gamers to throw their money into will not succeed!
You know what's sad about all this, a multiplayer puzzle solving game would of kicked ass. Played through all the we were here games recentish and a puzzle game with a studio like rocksteady behind it could of been awesome.
"Unalive Squad" sounds like a viable game to develop.
Cmon now this is weak as water youtube, its the self deletion squad ;).
I doubt Phil Spencer will ever say anything precise. He will give some generic recounts of problems, but not the juicy bits we want, or he would probably incur in some lawsuit and anyway would be very bad look for any future role.
But I’m wondering if there’s any chance Todd Howard or Pete Hines will take his place after.
I can take a Badminton Team to play in a Tennis tournament, but I won't expect them to win gold. Or even bronze.
A multiplayer puzzler with platforming, custom avatars and chat support sounds like it could be fun. These ceos are stupid.
This "CULTURE OF PERFECTIONISM" is anything but that.
It's a culture of SINGLE PASS, that take them away of perfectionism. Unlike the Arkham game that had multiple passes, improving the game at each one, Suicide Squad is clearly made on the first pass, after they TRIED TO PREDICT everything ahead to be "perfect at the first try".. That's why Arkham City looks like the recent game and Suicide Squad looks like the thing from 10 years ago.
Culture of "did in a single try" is more precise than "perfectionism".
A multiplayer puzzle game sounds pretty awesome actually.
all skull and bones had to do was pull the assasins creed out of black flag and just leave the pirating with some multiplayer and more islands and legendary ships to plunder, and possibly a kraken 10 person raid boss
Wow. It did indeed not stand a chance. A billion? On that IP? Suits have no idea what people want.
This article is bizarre. Hill had a major role in the success in the previous entries, but he's made all these amateur micromanaging mistakes for this one? That only makes sense if someone else was really holding the reins in the past had left.
You could always call it "Silverside Squad: Feed the Justice League."
I'd love more multiplayer puzzlers. There's an open world multiplayer puzzle game called Islands of Insight that's soooo good.
I love that you’re truly had to sensor EVERY instance of that word because of TH-cam’s policies
Welcome to the growing censorship and late stage capitalist system of the global west
You should do a deep dive on these generic open world games that all fit the same mould. A sprawling world filled with side quests and collectibles.
I had a feeling a story like this would drop after reviews came out. No wonder SSKTJL sucks so bad. I would have loved to play the original version of this game, but I'm afraid that's lost to the sands of time and may never see a home computer or television screen. Thanks to everything that happened in the last five years, we're stuck with what we have, and I - a person who just wants to have fun playing a game - want no part of that.
Some of this makes little to no sense especially when all but 2 members of the Arkham team left 8 years ago, which was 2 years prior to the full development of this game. The 2 left when the game went into full development as in 6 years ago.
As for sales. Hogwarts Legacy did amazing and no one predicted it just like Baldur's Gate 3. The Suicide Squad was 3rd on NPD for January and February in the middle of the Japanese game flood, which sold decently well. MK1 did sell well for a fighting game and wasn't even close to Hogwarts Legacy. MK1 did outsell all of the Fighting game competition in 2023.
On the Hogwarts Legacy DLC. Its a Summer Update and the details on how big it is has yet to be reported. I doubt that it would be a major game update like Cyberpunk had last year.
Yeah the ceos of rocksteady, because they were likely pressured from above. Technically not told to, but they were told to
Unalive squad: Dispose of the Justice League has a nice ring to it
I’m not surprised, but I still am surprised… how do these companies not see what they are doing, when similar things are happening all around them??
I think at the time, a lot of these games were greenlit within years of each other. It seemed promising at the time of inception, but obviously, as more of these live service games released and failed, it was probably too late to turn things around, since the games take 6 to 7 years.
How wild TH-cam thinks its users are too stupid to differentiate bad things from the titles of movies and games that they just censor everything
10:00 I wish that was something the devs over at CIG would learn regarding Star Citizen. That game is bloating out of control to the point where content that they slated to be delivered almost 5 years ago is just now on the horizon.
Why censor the game's name all across the video and audio and then put it straight up in the video title? Makes no sense.
its frustrating when this came out as a disaster and everyone was putting all the blame on warner brothers because like yeah WB sucks ass and they are probably a big part of why this game is how it is, but I always felt like we would eventually learn that the blame largely lies with the former studio leadership who cut and run when their bad decisions didnt pan out, and well look at what we know now
Skull and Bones is doing decent numbers because they're letting people play it for free and selling it for half price. Whatever the numbers are now, it's as good as it will ever get.
At first glance the gameplay seems okay, too bad the bad traits of being a live service ruined the game.
Maybe if it was more focus as a single player game it would've work
Every time I hear "unalive" I lose 40 brain cells
i understand having to self censer its just where we are at unfourtantly but it will never not irk me. when we have no real words left and everything is a guess where will we be
I'm staying far the fuck away from Hill's new game lmao
Welcome back to news everybody ❤
I think the talent left Rocksteady before release is this correct?
Most of the Arkham ones left long long before release if that is what you are asking.
This isn't my kind of game so it was never something I would have played but what's up with Harley Quinn's face? It kind of creeps me out.
I know if I could, I would hire whoever did the facial animations in that game. Some of the best in the industry hand down
it's mocap.
really harley quinn have like no feminine attributs at all in ethier her movement or of facial animations
@@Tompa8411 considering it was mocap from a real woman u are so full of it
i refuse to believe saying or showing the word suicide is causing issues
We need to be more open about mental health and depression in this world but also can we ban any use of the word suicide.
Like, who greenlights crap like that!?
Whomever it was, replace those people.