Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League didn't just flop—it torched the souls of the people who built it. Devs Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong spilled to Bloomberg that the live-service pivot, endless delays, and exec spreadsheets turned passion into pure burnout, with Armstrong admitting he could feel himself "coming apart at the seams" and was done with the industry.

The $200 million Warner Bros. loss wasn't some abstract number; it came from chasing billion-dollar franchise dreams on a game the studio had zero multiplayer experience making, complete with toxic positivity that shut down real criticism and six-month "fix everything" deadlines that solved jack. Rydby flat-out said he stopped feeling like he was making games and was just chasing marketing metrics instead.

Now the pair are gone, bootstrapping an indie deckbuilder RPG called Secret of Circadia on Kickstarter because the AAA machine made them question if they even wanted to stay in the biz. Suits still haven't learned a damn thing—passion projects got buried under live-service greed, and this is the corpse they left behind.