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What We Expect from WWE Dev’s Rival Pro Wrestling IP

AJ Styles WWE 2K17

When Yuke’s announced that it was making a new wrestling game that had nothing to do whatsoever with the WWE 2K franchise, most people were a little bit shocked and worried. Did this mean that 2K had lost the franchise as a publisher? What would this mean for future WWE titles?

Luckily, we’ve stumbled upon some stuff that gives us some insight into what is going on and we’ll let you know what we think it all means. Basically, Yuke’s is commissioning its own wrestling game as part of an internal project to “spark creativity” on their dev team. What that means exactly for a wrestling video game we don’t know but we have a few ideas as to why this is suddenly so important for Yuke’s. First, it all has to do with the fact that eSports is getting huge and is slated to become a major pillar of professional sports entertainment. One of the biggest segments in this genre is the fighting game genre and it pretty much dominates when it comes to things that WWE should at least be some kind of force.

But it isn’t, and whether that is due to being based on an already existing sports franchise or the fact that the wrestling games employ somewhat arcane mechanics compared to fighting games, we don’t know. What we do know is that Yuke’s wants its team to come up with its own ideas to try and see if they can’t find some game mechanic that will be a good middle ground between simulation and fighting game ripoff. Again, we think that all of this has to do with the fact that eSports is huge and WWE wants in on the action.

Plus, from Yuke’s standpoint, they don’t want to be irrelevant and married to a franchise that could give them the boot if performance slips. Generating creativity in this way frees people up to see what they can do without the constraints of the past. We think this is a really smart, solid way to move forward. Also, we really think that any concept that is so radical and exceptional will inevitably become the next WWE. We wouldn’t take this as news that Yuke’s is making a separate wrestling game; rather, we think it is the devs trying to come up with new concepts under which to relaunch the WWE franchise or even create a spinoff.

Will it all work out? Only time will tell and if we see something outside of WWE released in the future. We really think this is a creative space for the WWE franchise and not the birth of a new wrestling game itself. That said, you never know where these things are concerned and only time will know for sure. It is undoubtedly important for WWE to become part of the fighting game eSports craze in some way. We just think they’re trying to figure that out still.

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