For the past 20 years, Yukes has been developing games for fans of World Wrestling Entertainment (better known as WWE) and releasing their game through publisher THQ originally, then 2K. As of August 6th, 2019, Yukes is no longer developing games for 2K and WWE … Visual Concepts is. This sudden, unexpected change has happened only three months or so after they announced that a separate team in Yukes would be developing another wrestling game internally, as competition to the team working on WWE 2K20. When that was announced, I was happy as there is only one game they’re putting out that is wrestling focused, when they used to make games for World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) — a company they once owned a major percentage of.
2K sent out the following statement:
“WWE 2K20 will be developed by Visual Concepts, who have worked with Yukes on the development of the series since WWE 2K14. As we’ve continued to invest in the WWE 2K franchise, we’ve seen the Visual Concepts team displayed incredible passion, talent, and commitment to the future of the series. We thank Yukes for their years of partnership and are excited to see what the Visual Concepts team brings to the franchise moving forward.”
This officially confirms that Yukes is no longer part of the WWE 2K series and, as I stated earlier, they have been working on the WWE series since 1999’s WWF Smackdown on the PlayStation. So, what does this mean for 2K20 that’s launching in about two months? As it stands right now, the game is using Yukes’ engine and before Visual Concepts worked fully on the series, they worked on the animations, audio, and scripts for the game while Yukes was in charge of the game engine, the creation suite, and all the other elements.
Yukes did release a statement that is a bit of good news, at least in the short term:
“We will continue to provide support to 2K with regards to the game engine.”
Long term though, Visual Concepts has full control and we could see them bring on their own game engine that the studio built from the ground up in the next game after 2K20 … which, in a sense, would be great to see since the next generation of consoles is right around the corner. We’d then get a completely new game with brand new assets that could make the most with the brand new hardware, however, the downside of this would be that 2K and Visual Concepts would have to recreate all the modes that fans have grown to love from scratch. This, of course, will take time and will make future games limited … the same way that 2K and Yukes had to for 2K15 on PS4 and Xbox One.
A positive for Yukes is that they are now free to focus on the new game they announced in May, as they created an internal team to compete with the WWE team as they saw their creators were beginning to lose sight of their passion and confidence — which is not a good thing for any developer or studio. At that time, the senior vice president and producer, Hiromi Furuta, did state that they still have a good partnership with 2K and WWE. Now that they are free from working on the WWE 2K series, they could either work with another wrestling promotion, like the newest company All Elite Wrestling (AEW), or still make a WWE game different from the 2K series, similar to when the PlayStation had the Smackdown series and Xbox had the Raw series.
These are only guesses though, but time will tell! What do you think of this news? Leave your comments below and stay tuned for more from GamingLyfe.
