Suicide Squad development felt ‘like I wasn’t making games anymore,’ says director
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League director Axel Rydby shares his experience of working on the doomed live-service.
Development of Rocksteady’s 2024 Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League made one of its directors want to stop making games entirely.
Axel Rydby is one of four directors who worked on Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad game, and he’s shared his experience with its troubled development.
Rydby joined the acclaimed studio in 2018, shortly after the studio released its last Batman: Arkham game. “There was definitely a sense when we first moved on to it — arrogance is the wrong word, but a confidence,” Armstrong told Bloomberg. “We’re coming back off hit after hit. Of course we’ll be able to do this.”
Executives from publisher Warner Bros. were eager to make a tidy profit from the live-service game, but Rydby didn’t want players to feel they needed to “buy a bunch of crap to enjoy the game.” Over time, and after being delayed from 2022 to 2024, the priorities of the executives shifted toward recouping their investment.
“That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore,” Rydby shared. “I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in.”
Now, Rydby has teamed up with fellow former Rocksteady developer, Johnny Armstrong, and has launched a Kickstarter for the indie title Secret of Circadia.
In February 2025, it was reported that Rocksteady was working on a new single-player Batman game. Later that year in July 2025, it was reported that Rocksteady was hiring for a new live-service game.
In May 2026, Rocksteady was listed as a co-developer on Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, though it is not known if this is the single-player Batman game that was previously mentioned.
