For years fans talked about a potential AEW video game dropping and after several delays AEW Fight Forever was released in 2023. Unfortunately it seems that the game was not a success for All Elite Wrestling.
In a recent YouTube video, Insider Gaming executive editor Mike Straw noted that he spoke with AEW sources who claimed that the company lost at least $30 million on the game. It was also noted that the company doesn’t have any imminent plans to develop a new game at the moment.
“They lost, according to those who I spoke with, at least $30 million they had to write off in the game or write down from the game. That’s due to development delays and deadlines being missed, leading to internal delays and ultimately external delays. As I had reported, the original time to release that game was in 2022. It didn’t come out until near Forbidden Door 2023, leading to a lot of extra time in development. And when games take that long, they cost more to make. And it also did not sell all that well. They had their certain limits or expectations, but from what I’ve been told is it got about roughly half of what their expectations were.
I don’t have the exact numbers, but the words I was told was, ‘We sold about half of what we were expecting, leading to a big reason why we lost so much.’ Now, as far as the future of AEW games, they are interested in it. They are interested in revisiting it, but they’re going to do it way down the line.
I don’t think there’s anything close. The sources I spoke to said there’s nothing imminent right now. There are rumblings that they had talked to a third party about potentially a licensing deal that way for a game, but when I had reached out to AEW sources on that, they told me in no short words that they didn’t ‘f**king know anything about it.’
So, who knows what’s going on with that? But I think all those rumblings can be put to rest, as the person who told me this, the main source, would have direct knowledge of any licensing or agreement deals that the company would sign.
So, there we have it. Not the biggest, not the best news, but it is an idea of where things ended up with Fight Forever, despite the fact that, you know, looking back on it, some people do appreciate the ease and the pick-up-and-play of the game.”