I wasn't making games anymore. I was following a spreadsheet.
At Rocksteady Studios, the dream of making games gave way to the discipline of feeding a machine — one that measured human creativity in retention curves and engagement metrics. Director Axel Rydby and developer Armstrong spent years inside a live-service project that slowly replaced the act of making with the act of optimizing, until both men reached a point where continuing was no longer possible. Their departure, and the modest independent game they've chosen to build in its wake, is a quiet but pointed statement about what the industry has asked its creators to become.
- After seven years of live-service development, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League left its key creators not exhausted but hollowed — one director felt he had stopped making games entirely, another described feeling himself 'coming apart at the seams.'
- The pressure wasn't just workload — it was a fundamental transformation of creative work into spreadsheet optimization, where marketing metrics no one could explain became the compass for every decision.
- The human cost rippled outward: many of the original Arkham-era creative voices have now left Rocksteady, quietly dismantling the team that once defined a generation of superhero gaming.
- In response, Rydby and Armstrong launched a Kickstarter for an indie RPG deckbuilder with an $11,000 goal — a deliberately small act of reclamation, choosing something true over something vast.
- Rocksteady is rumored to be returning to Batman, but the studio that does so will be a different one — carrying different scars, led by different people, shaped by a cautionary chapter the industry has yet to fully reckon with.
Axel Rydby stepped into the director's chair of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in 2022, inheriting a project already seven years in the making. What he found was not a creative endeavor but a machine — one that demanded engagement metrics, retention curves, and marketing spreadsheets so opaque that no one could explain them, yet everyone was expected to serve them. "That's when I started feeling like I wasn't making games anymore," he said. The disconnect was total.
Another developer, Armstrong, experienced something more severe than burnout. The project didn't just drain him — it unmade him. He described feeling himself coming apart at the seams, reaching a point where he knew he was done, even if he wasn't sure what came next. Both men eventually left Rocksteady, not in protest but out of necessity.
What they built afterward speaks volumes: a Kickstarter campaign for a small independent RPG deckbuilder called Secret of Circadia, seeking just $11,000. The modesty of that number is almost the point — a deliberate turn away from scale toward something personal and true.
The broader wound at Rocksteady runs deep. The studio that made the Arkham games — beloved works that defined superhero gaming for a generation — became a symbol of live-service design's worst tendencies: creative vision sacrificed to quarterly metrics, artistry replaced by optimization. Many of the original creative voices have since departed.
Rumors suggest Rocksteady's next project will return to Batman, but it will be a different studio making it — one reshaped by loss, turnover, and hard-won disillusionment. The story of Rydby and Armstrong is not unique to one studio. It is a pattern repeating across the industry, and the question it leaves behind is whether publishers will ever account for the cost that no spreadsheet can measure.
Axel Rydby became director of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in 2022, stepping into leadership of a project that had already consumed seven years of development time. By that point, the weight of the investment was unmistakable. Warner Bros. needed returns. The studio needed engagement metrics. The live-service machinery had to be fed.
What Rydby found himself doing, day after day, was not designing games. He was chasing numbers on spreadsheets—marketing analyses so opaque that no one could quite explain what they meant, yet everyone was expected to optimize toward them. The creative act of making something had been replaced by the mechanical act of maximizing replayability, of engineering engagement, of turning human behavior into retention curves. "That's when I started feeling like I wasn't making games anymore," he said. The disconnect was total. This was not the industry he had signed up for.
He was not alone in that feeling. Another developer on the project, Armstrong, experienced something closer to complete dissolution. The work didn't just drain him—it unmade him. "I felt everything drained from me," he recalled. "I said, 'I can't do this again. I don't know if I'm done with the industry, but I'm done.' I could feel myself coming apart at the seams." That language matters. Not burnout in the abstract sense, but a literal sense of internal fracture, of a person reaching a breaking point where continuing forward felt impossible.
Both men left Rocksteady. They needed to leave. What they've done since tells its own story: they launched a Kickstarter campaign for an independent RPG deckbuilder called Secret of Circadia, seeking $11,000 from backers to fund it themselves. The amount is modest by industry standards, almost deliberately so. It's the budget of people who want to make something small and true rather than something vast and hollow.
Suicide Squad itself had been a reckoning for Rocksteady. The studio had built its reputation on the Arkham games—beloved, critically acclaimed, the kind of work that defined a generation of superhero gaming. This new project was supposed to be a natural evolution. Instead, it became a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with live-service design: the endless pursuit of engagement, the sacrifice of creative vision to quarterly metrics, the transformation of game development into a spreadsheet exercise.
The fallout extends beyond two departing developers. Many of the key creative voices who shaped the Arkham series have since left the studio. Rocksteady still has talented people on staff, but the studio that emerges from this period will be fundamentally different. There are rumors that the next project will return to Batman—a homecoming of sorts. But it will be made by a different team, with different leadership, carrying different scars.
What happened at Rocksteady is not unique. It's a story playing out across the industry: talented people entering game development because they love making games, then discovering that the business model has changed the work into something unrecognizable. The question now is whether the exodus of people like Rydby and Armstrong will finally signal to publishers that the live-service model, at least as it's currently practiced, extracts a cost that no spreadsheet can measure.
Notable Quotes
That's when I started feeling like I wasn't making games anymore. I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly.— Axel Rydby, former director
I felt everything drained from me. I could feel myself coming apart at the seams.— Armstrong, developer
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When Rydby talks about following a spreadsheet instead of making games, what do you think he means by that?
He means the creative decisions stopped being about what would make a good game and started being about what would keep players logging in. Every feature, every reward, every progression system—it all had to serve engagement metrics that marketing had decided on. The game became a vehicle for those metrics rather than the metrics serving the game.
But live-service games need to be profitable. Doesn't that require understanding player behavior?
Of course. But there's a difference between understanding your players and designing purely to manipulate their time. Rydby's point is that the spreadsheet became the boss, not a tool. No one could even explain clearly what they were optimizing for—it was just this abstract thing everyone had to serve.
Armstrong said he felt himself "coming apart at the seams." That's pretty visceral language for a job.
Seven years is a long time to feel like you're failing at the thing you set out to do. He wasn't just tired. He was experiencing a kind of identity crisis—the work he was doing didn't match who he thought he was as a creator. That's not burnout. That's something closer to despair.
Do you think the Kickstarter for Secret of Circadia is a statement?
Absolutely. They're saying: we can make games for $11,000 that feel more like games than a $200 million live-service project. That's not just a career move. That's a rebuke.
What does this mean for the next Batman game Rocksteady is supposedly making?
It will be made without the people who understood what made the Arkham games work. That's not necessarily fatal—studios survive leadership changes. But it suggests that the institutional knowledge, the creative DNA that made those games special, has been fractured. The next game might be competent. It probably won't be beloved in the same way.