Rocksteady's QA team shrinks amid disappointing Suicide Squad sales

Batman Arkham developer Rocksteady is downsizing its quality assurance teams as it faces the "unfortunate reality" of lower-than-expected game sales.

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After a string of hits with the wildly successful Batman Arkham series, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a big miss for Rocksteady. The game failed to meet sales expectations, and also did not monetize as well as WB Games would have liked. All-told, WB lost around $200 million on Suicide Squad. The game's soft underperformance led to a -66% reduction in game revenues for WB's Q2'24 period, but of course this is compared to the meteoric sales of Hogwarts Legacy from a year prior.

Even still, there's no denying that Warner Bros. Discovery is not happy with Rocksteady's latest game. In a call to investors, WBD exec JP Parrette said: "In the short period of 12 months, we went from having the record year that we had in 2023 with Hogwarts Legacy, to unfortunately having the opposite side of that spectrum with Suicide Squad."

Suicide Squad's miss is now leading to more layoffs at WB's games division. Rocksteady has reportedly cut its QA teams in nearly half. Sources tell Eurogamer that Rocksteady is dropping from 33 quality assurance testers to just 15.

Typically, this is not a great move for game developers. QA are imperative parts of the product testing phases and are responsible for some of the most important work in the process of games development; they identify bugs and glitches, giving feedback along the way.

The news is rather timely given recent comments from Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who strongly indicated that the company coud license out key DC properties to interested third-party publishers and game developers, not unlike how Disney will license out Marvel and Star Wars to game-makers like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts.