AEW Fight Forever Flopped With A Reported $30 Million In Losses

AEW Fight Forever Reportedly Lost $30 Million

“Speaking with sources who were privy to the information, Fight Forever was a massive loss for AEW.” said Shaw. “That shouldn’t come as a surprise…but just how much they lost might shock people. They lost, according to those who I spoke with, at least 30 million dollars…that’s due to development 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.”

AEW Fight Forever’s release was a bittersweet moment given the struggles to get to market, and many top stars were omitted from the game due to deadline issues. These stars include the Acclaimed, FTR, Toni Storm, Claudio Castagnoli, Danhausen and Swerve. Some stars were added to the game via post-launch DLC packs.

Reviews of the game were lukewarm at best. Many seemed to enjoy Fight Forever’s arcade style of in-game combat, but some criticisms called out its bare-boned Create-A-Wrestler features. In the end, sales suggested that most fans skipped this game entirely.

“It also did not sell all that well. They had their [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 are 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.”

AEW Fight Forever Losses Raise Questions About AEW’s Business

AEW remains interested in remaining in the gaming division, but this will not materialize until the distant future. For now, AEW has bigger fish to fry, and those fish will rely on the tumultuous merger between Paramount+ and WBD. The $111 billion merger has divided Hollywood amid a legal battle from the State of California to stop the deal altogether.

AEW’s current TV rights deal with WBD will expire in 2028, and AEW is nearing negotiation talks in search of an increase. The multitude of variables make it impossible to predict when or if AEW will secure a new lucrative television rights deal similar to their renewal by WBD in 2023.

AEW is a privately owned company, but there are still multiple Key Performance Indicators that will contribute to whether or not a streamer will pay for their product. Attendance has been low in 2026, with the average TV show hovering around 3,000 fans.

AEW’s video game loss will serve as another Black eye for the promotion’s business. But AEW remains strong on pay-per-view, where buyrates and attendance are more stable, though ticket sales for its third trip to Wembley Stadium for AEW All In have underwhelmed. With AEW moving thousands of tickets in days, as it closes in on 40,000, this figures to be a heavily papered event in a quarter-full stadium with a gate that will not match its freebie-filled attendance.

The next 12 months will be crucial for AEW. And as many uncertainties as there are, a second video game is certainly not happening anytime soon.