Eric Bischoff has chimed in on AEW Fight Forever.
For those of you who are gamers, but maybe not pro wrestling fans, Eric Bischoff is a former wrestling promoter, and on-stage personality. Most fans do remember him best for having run WCW, the WWE’s big competitor during the late 1990s, and also working in the WWE itself. Eric’s career also includes tenures at the AWA, Jim Crockett Promotions, and TNA Impact, and dates all the way back to 1986.
Bischoff also made several appearances in AEW itself, between 2020 and 2021, but more recently, he has become a vocal critic of AEW and their owner, Tony Khan. It was in that capacity that he has been talking about AEW and Khan in his podcasts and interviews in recent weeks.
Of course, we usually don’t write about pro wrestling personalities on this site, but this time, Bischoff shared an interesting tidbit about the video game AEW Fight Forever. He said:
“Look at their video game. Which, by the way, we don’t hear much about that video game do we? Because they lost a f***ing fortune doing it. Because they don’t know what they’re doing. They were incompetent in its design and implementation. It failed miserably and they spent a fortune.
I’ve heard the number from people in the industry. I’m not going to repeat it because I don’t know it’s a fact and I don’t do that s***. That’s what Dave Meltzer does. But if the number that I heard is close to being accurate it was a disaster.”
As an aside, Dave Meltzer is a pro wrestling journalist, who’s often accused of favoring AEW and possibly having connections in the company. He’s also had to apologize for inaccurate coverage of the industry, like the time he apologized to wrestler Seth Rollins in 2019.
In our report last week, we cited Insider Gaming’s source who claimed that AEW Fight Forever‘s cost ballooned between 1.5 to 2.5 of its original budget. That cost included hiring veteran game developers who worked at AKI, and building their own video game engine.
While AEW Fight Forever certainly has its fans, the company has never actually shared sales figures. Tony Khan did confidently say that it had great sales and would have a bright future upon its launch. In the months since then, regular player numbers have dwindled, with many players pointing out the title’s poor production values, late delivery of features and modes, and the high cost of microtransactions, as red flags that it likely did not make its money back, even now.
It’s also unclear what kind of future AEW could have in video games, which is certainly a sad note for what fans hoped would be a return to the 1990s era of wrestling video games. But we are all waiting to hear from AEW on what they do plan to do next.
