AEW Fight Forever reportedly losing $30 million sounds crazy, but I hope AEW sees it as an expensive lesson instead of a reason to walk away from gaming. Learn from it. Try again. Because underneath all the mistakes, they actually had something special. Everybody says they want wrestling games to be different. Everybody wants the AKI style back. Everybody talks about No Mercy, Def Jam Vendetta, Fight for NY, Shut Your Mouth and Day of Reckoning. Fight Forever was built around many of those same fundamentals. Fast, pick up and play wrestling. Simple controls with depth. Arcade style gameplay. Freedom. Chaos. Environmental interaction. That old school feeling people constantly say they miss, just with a modern foundation. Yet when somebody actually tried to make something different, people laughed at it. We’ve seen this before. TNA Impact, WWE All Stars, Wrestle Kingdom and other wrestling games were criticized when they were current. Now, 15 plus years later, I constantly see clips of those games with people asking: “Why don’t we get wrestling games like this anymore?” Don’t wait 10 years for Twitter to tell you Fight Forever was underrated. Play it yourself. That doesn’t mean AEW, THQ or the developers shouldn’t be criticized. They absolutely should. The entrances were terrible. The pin system needed work. Content was lacking. Creation needed more depth. Match types were missing. Post launch support should have been much stronger. But after spending so much time inside this game’s files, that’s what frustrates me the most. The foundation was there. As modders, we’ve uncovered and expanded things people wanted from day one. Different ladder matches, four ways, Tornado Tags, gameplay changes, arenas, characters, assets and combinations that continue showing how much untapped potential exists inside this game. There are moments where you look through the files and wonder why certain ideas weren’t taken further. Fight Forever didn’t need to become WWE 2K. It needed AEW to fully commit to making Fight Forever the best version of Fight Forever. The way the game was seemingly abandoned afterward made things worse. Kenny seemed far less connected to it after release. AEW Gaming barely acknowledges it. You rarely see AEW talent streaming it. It feels like something they would rather forget. Meanwhile, we’re still here. Not just me or Mod Forever either. There are multiple modders still creating, discovering and pushing Fight Forever beyond what people thought was possible. We’re doing what we can to keep this game alive because some of us genuinely see what it could have been. And I hope there’s an AEW Fight Forever 2. Take everything that worked. Admit what didn’t. Listen to the community. Give development more time. Expand the creation suite. Give us more match types. Fix the systems that didn’t work. Support the game after launch. Most importantly, keep pushing the boundaries. Because for somebody like me who always wanted a modern game carrying the spirit of Def Jam Fight for NY, Vendetta, No Mercy, Shut Your Mouth and Day of Reckoning, Fight Forever came closer than people give it credit for. So before letting somebody who played it for a few hours tell you the game is trash, actually experience it yourself. Try Fight Forever with mods too. Not only mine. There are other talented creators doing great work with this game. Explore your options. Play different wrestling games. Decide what YOU enjoy. Because I have a feeling wrestling fans are eventually going to do exactly what they’ve done countless times before. Years from now somebody will post a 50 second Fight Forever clip, it’ll go viral, and everybody will suddenly say: “Why don’t wrestling games play like this anymore?” The crazy part is, the game was here the whole time.