Last week we reported all the known WWE releases and 2K21‘s reported cancellation. On Friday morning, just as we began publishing, it was reported by multiple outlets that the games had officially been canceled. Wrestling games are a perfect example of what I want to talk about today. Some genres need to die, at least temporarily. If you’ve played games for long enough, with a great enough depth in genres and sustained exposure to all those games, you’ll notice something. Interest dies fast. Now it seems there is another instance of this in games and particularly wrestling games once again.

If you look at the history of wrestling games dating back to the late 80s and 90s, you’ll notice one thing, they stayed reasonably similar throughout. Towards the end of the latter decade, the games would become that late PS1-era 3D that was as blocky as Minecraft would be by the end of the next decade. The PS2-era would see more advanced 3D games, and by about 2005 they would become arcade-simulators nearer to what we see now. Soon enough they would get their GM modes that I yell and scream about, before losing them around the time that THQ went under. By about 2015 they would become full wrestling sims, and the largest games the series had ever seen.

More recently, management games had a resurgence. Keep in mind, for something to come back, you have to have died or come close to death in the first place. I love the tycoon games of the 2000s as much as the next person, but no matter how many hours I put into Hotel Giant, it wasn’t the height of the genre. The 90s had passed, the early to mid-2010s were still to come, there was a lull and they had effectively died. Of course, since the early to mid-10s we’ve had SimAirport, Cities Skylines, Planet Coaster, Prison Architect, Frostpunk, and most importantly, Two Point Hospital. The genre has come back for a full-blown swing for the fences with Two Point Hospital signaling that Theme Hospital-era once again.

Every genre has peaks and valleys. Just over ten years ago around Saints Row 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV it was open-world games that were at the height of the industry. If you were around in 2011-12, it was starting to open up to more than one genre at a time, with Rogue-lites & Rogue-likes fighting it out with survival crafting games. I still to this day have the fatigue of crafting games. If I have to punch a tree to get a pickaxe, to get stone and make another pickaxe, I’m going to use that stone to bash-in the skull of a developer. That’s the problem we face now a few years on with Steam’s early access system and Epic‘s barrage of games. I think we can mostly agree that a bit of fatigue has set in.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good rogue-like/lite anytime, and once in a while I’ll jump into Minecraft. However, with the previously mentioned barrage of games, you can see why someone might get tired of them all of a sudden. This is why I’m saying that games, though more specifically the genres they lay-in, need to die, at least for a while.

The reason WWE 2K16 and games like Prison Architect or Two Point Hospital still feel familiar but also new is the time. They all have been given the time to look at what works for the audience and they stuck to that formula. WWE 2K16, aside from the entire creation suite, is one of the barest wrestling games around. The following year added pieces that were missing back into the games. That doesn’t mean the games are bad, it means the sections subtracted from the games through the 10-years prior, might not have been needed after all. Though I will contest until my last breath, the GM mode is a requirement. It was, in essence, listening to a powerful rock ballad from the 80s in an acoustic form, it’s stripped down. It doesn’t always mean that it is better, but it can and was on this occasion.

While, for the most part, the indie scene has resurrected the management genre as an example, it could in some way induce what has been done with survival games; That is of course, to a lesser extent. It could be an issue with a small genre of games that require a small aspect of complexity, at least compared to half of the procedurally-generated open-world survival crafting games out there. Go on Steam right now and you’ll see reams of pages of both excellent and god awful management games. So, I guess the question here would be, how do these games, and genres, die?

To take this back to wrestling for a moment, we’ve got WWE’s yearly (minus this year’s edition) release and on occasion a Fire Pro Wrestling game. Outside of those, you have to play Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter, none of which fit the wrestling game mold. In recent years it has become commonplace for small indie promotions like CHIKARA or ICW to set out plans for a game, the former doing so with their Action Arcade Wrestling. Then during a recent AMA with Bleacher Report, Cody Rhodes said that while it will be some time away, AEW will get a game of the promotion’s own stars and venues.

It would be stupid to say that we should stop all development of all games for two or three years, however, it’s the oversaturation and lack of respite that’s the problem. Between Smackdown Vs. Raw 2008 and WWE 2K16 I wouldn’t suggest a single game in the wrestling genre, and between RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Prison Architect‘s early access release, there are very few management games to suggest. My point is, we need a grace period for both our interest and the quality of games to gain traction once again. Expecting every game to be the best overall or in general, is stupid; You’ll learn more from a bad game than you will a good one.

At the time of writing, 2K and WWE are set to make an announcement on Monday (which has already happened) about what will replace the release of 2K21. Those that are optimistic think it will be a smaller arcade-style game like those of the 80s and 90s, while those of us who are pessimistic assume it to be a mobile game or something of that ilk. It would take some work to be buggier than 2K20, though given the short notice we’re getting on this one, it might be as needlessly rushed and horrid as the game before it.

There is however, one thing we do know from WWE’s yearly releases. They need to return to the formula and go from there with a solid release. The same could be said of many other games and en masse several genres.

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