Angry Joe Almost Got It Right (Suicide Squad review)

[owsf2000]

Just got finished Joe's angry ranting review of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League review.

I'd say he's pretty much spot on with pretty much everything he said about it - keeping in mind I never bought/played it personally. Watched reviews, watched some let's plays, etc. That's as far as I'm willing to take any live service crap pretty much. But you don't need to play it to understand the flaws and see the effect being churned out as a live service game had on the game design process.

However there is one comment near the end I have to take exception with. Starting at about 1:15:09, he talks about how "A once great company gets gutted even further. (if it doesn't meet it's revenue stream expectations in a live service shitshow)."

In particular it's "Only thankfully the smart ones have already left. The founders have peaced out of Rocksteady when they saw the writing on the wall and formed their own new company HundredStar. I wish them well. That was the right move. Rocksteady had sold it's soul and we're all worse off for it."

Who SOLD the company Joe? Why, the FOUNDERS did. With a treasure trove of documented evidence at this point of what ALWAYS happens to a game dev that sells itself - it's soul - regardless of any promises given during the sale. The founders sold the company for a profit, then fucked off to build a new company where they'll likely just end up doing it all over again.

So yeah, I'm not going to be singing any praises for HundredStar. They're just, at best, another disaster waiting to happen.

Comments

[kane_magus]

Probably not going to watch a 1.3 hour long video review of a game I've already decided I'm never going to bother playing, but I did watch the bit at the timestamp you mentioned. Yeah, Joe saying good on the founders of Rocksteady for being smart enough to get out before things got bad... that's as fucking stupid as if some goof said something like "Man, Mojang sucks now after it got sold out to Microsoft. Good thing Notch saw the writing on the wall and got out when he did."

At this point in time, I say that any video game dev/studio/publisher that sells out to a big(ger) company fully deserves to have their IP gutted and destroyed and themselves unceremoniously laid off, assuming they bothered to try to stick around and didn't just float away on a cloud of money, of course. Sucks for those who may have liked their games, but it's not like those devs gave a shit about that at all, or else they wouldn't have sold out to a bigger company in the first place. Seriously, I would rather have a favorite video game developer simply go out of business and cease to exist entirely, than for them to sell out to some bigger company who, invariably, will almost immediately kill them off (or, at least, zombify them, e.g. BioWare) and bastardize their games from then on, until the heat death of the universe.

Prior to your post here, I had never heard of this HundredStar thing before. Probably just another thing for them to build up and then sell to whoever forks over enough cash to buy it, same as with Rocksteady. That's a pretty good hustle if you can pull it off, I guess. *shrug + eye roll*