Rumor: AEW Fight Forever Went Over Budget & Released Too Soon, IP’s Future Unclear

gameranx.com:

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This explains why AEW Fight Forever DLC has been coming in slow, outdated, and overpriced.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.

Ther