Eric Bischoff heard about problems behind the scenes of AEW Fight Forever years before reports claimed the game lost the company at least $30 million. He wasn’t investigating AEW at the time either. He just happened to get connected with a company working on the game—and what he heard apparently told him plenty.
While speaking on 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff revealed that he spoke with the gaming company a couple of years ago while researching a completely separate project that potentially involved a video game.
“I actually had some—and I don’t remember enough of the conversation that I had a couple years ago with a gaming company that was working with AEW on this game. I was working on a project that may have involved a video game.”
Bischoff wasn’t calling around trying to dig up dirt on AEW. He needed information about the gaming business, got connected through a third party and mostly sat there listening.
“So somehow or another I got connected through a third party with this company and vaguely remember the conversation that I had. And it was more—I didn’t ask any questions. I was just on the receiving end of listening to it.”
What he remembers hearing is where things get interesting. According to Bischoff, several high-profile AEW names were heavily involved in developing Fight Forever. He also mentioned an “obnoxious referee,” but stopped himself from naming anybody because he couldn’t remember enough of the conversation to confidently put names behind the claim. Bischoff believes that may have been where some of Fight Forever’s problems started.
“But several high-profile names and an obnoxious referee that were very involved in the development of the game and were—let’s just say they’ve never—they didn’t really understand. Yeah, just because you’re good at playing it doesn’t mean you’re good at developing it. Let’s—I’ll leave it at that.”
And that was probably the root cause of a lot of the delays and the overruns. And then, you know, relationships tend to fray under those conditions. And I think that’s probably what happened.”
This all started after Conrad Thompson brought up Insider Gaming executive editor Mike Straw’s report that AEW suffered a loss of at least $30 million on Fight Forever. The game was delayed several times before finally arriving in June 2023, with Straw also claiming it sold around half as many copies as AEW initially expected. Bischoff had a hard time believing the reported number at first.
“I don’t know if 30 million is right. It had to—they’d have to be really working hard at screwing shit up. Spend $30 million before they finish. But whatever. I don’t know. I don’t know. I have a hard time believing that that number is real.”
Then he thought about what happens when people start spending money in an industry they don’t fully understand. Suddenly, $30 million didn’t sound quite as impossible to the WWE Hall of Fame anymore.
“So can you—could you run up a tab of 30 million developing a video game? It’s quite possible. You could. You can burn some cash playing in a world you don’t even understand. You can go through a lot of money that way.”
Bischoff can’t confirm AEW actually lost $30 million, and he isn’t pretending he knows every detail of what went wrong with Fight Forever. But years before that number started making headlines, he had already heard enough from a company working on the game to come away questioning who AEW had helping steer the project.
What do you make of Eric Bischoff’s claims about AEW Fight Forever? Let us know in the comments.
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