New rumors have emerged about AEW Fight Forever’s development, that do not reflect well on everyone’s favorite wrestling company at the moment.
As reported by Insider Gaming, their sources tell a story of mismanagement of a promising project, and that mismanagement starts from when the game was first announced. One source claims the early announcement “killed the game from the start.” But what could that possibly mean?
AEW Fight Forever was officially announced in November 2020, but AEW EVPs and headliner talents The Young Bucks talked about wanting to make an AEW video game as early as October 2019, literally before the airing for the first AEW Dynamite. This raised fan expectations to want to get an AEW video game immediately.
But we are far from Yuke’s and AKI’s peak years, and even though they had made annual wrestling video games in recent years, the truth is video games at this scale need at least five years to make. This is true even for games made for the Nintendo Switch, as Splatoon 3 fans understand very well. Predictably enough, given the formal 2020 start of development, Insider Gaming’s sources believed that they released the game too early at 2023, and it needed one or two more years of development.
So why was it released prematurely? Their sources claim the game went to 2.5 times over the original budget, and there was a pertinent need to recoup back that investment. To quote Insider Gaming’s source:
“They (AEW) knew they were going to lose money on this game. But there was a lot of pressure to make money back solely because of how overbudget the game went.”
This explains why AEW Fight Forever DLC has been coming in slow, outdated, and overpriced. It also explains why many features that Yuke’s planned arrived too late or haven’t made it to the game. Late arrivals include the Beat the Elite mode and Stadium Stampede, but one that didn’t make it even though it could have made the game truly huge was crossplay, something the WWE 2K games don’t have.
There are other features that seem unlikely to make it, such as Trios matches, and may need to be added in a second AEW wrestling game. But therein lies the rub, as the prospects of an AEW Fight Forever 2 are not very good.
AEW hired Yuke’s, and brought back some former developers from AKI, and had a new game engine built from the ground up, just for AEW Fight Forever. They own the game engine, but of course, what business does a wrestling company have owning a game engine?
As of right now, Yuke’s is working through all their commitments with AEW for this title. The relationship between the two has not been smooth throughout all of this, and it continues to get worse as time goes on. AEW has final say on where their budding wrestling game franchise goes from there, whether they will work with Yuke’s again, etc.
AEW Fight Forever didn’t live up to everything fans were promised and hoped for, but as it turns out, it’s possible that it could have been closer to our expectations, and maybe even exactly right, if it was managed more properly. While some wrestling fans will point to WWE 2K or Fire Pro Wrestling World as the good wrestling games now, that really doesn’t make up for the unrealized potential that this one had.
