WWE has confirmed that 2K Games will not release WWE 2K21 this year, which has effectively cancelled the latest iteration of the series that has been released annually since 2000. The news arrived today during WWE’s Q1 2020 investors call when WWE Interim Chief Financial Officer Frank Riddick was asked if there was a video game included in this year’s budget.
“There’s not going to be a launch of the game this year,” said Riddick in response to a question about WWE 2K21.
The news of the cancellation isn’t the only bad news the WWE 2K franchise has faced over the past year. WWE 2K20 faced what was perhaps the worst release in franchise history, arriving in complete shambles at launch due to a slew of game breaking bugs.
Within a few short hours of the game’s launch #FixWWE2K20 was trending on social media as outraged fans voiced their displeasure over the lack of visual polish, countless bugs, and the inability to finish certain matches due to the broken mechanics. And this was all present in the game despite a day one patch of 12.6 GB. The WWE video game subreddit had a bug thread bursting with reports of bugs that you’d expect to see in a beta release of the game, not the finished product.
Suffice to say things didn’t go well.
Several weeks ago video game writer Justin Leeper, a former writer on the WWE 2K franchise, reported that there would be no WWE 2K21 released this year, citing “reliable sources” in a YouTube video. In the same video Leeper noted that 2K will be releasing a “different kind” of WWE video game this year, but from a different developer, not Visual Concepts. There’s still a lot of 2020 left to go, so we’ll just have to wait and see if Leeper’s second report was correct as well.
In the mean time it looks like it’s time to load up No Mercy again.
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