20 Ridiculous Reasons Video Games Were Cancelled
3. The Atrocious Response To WWE 2K20 (And The Pandemic) - WWE 2K21
WWE-branded video games have been all over the map quality-wise since forever, and the WWE 2K franchise is certainly no exception.
Since the brand launched with WWE 2K14, the series has been defined by promising gameplay undermined by outrageous amounts of bugs and a general lack of technical polish.
For years many fans suggested that 2K should take a "fallow year" to iron out the engine's kinks, but this was predictably ignored in favour of profit, quality be-damned.
Given that the WWE 2K games continued to sell well to an insatiable player-base, there wasn't much of an incentive for them to fix things.
But the wheels well and truly came off when WWE 2K20 was released in October 2019 to universal disdain from critics and players alike, with gameplay so thoroughly compromised by bugs as to be flat-out broken.
This was the first game in the WWE 2K series developed solely by Visual Concepts following the departure of lead studio Yuke's, and this failure made it clear 2K should've taken a year off for the studio change-over.
While WWE 2K20 was critically panned and also underperformed commercially, it wasn't until the pandemic hit in early 2020 that 2K finally admitted that the immediate development of a follow-up was a fool's errand.
As such, they announced they would be cancelling WWE 2K21, instead taking an extra year to make WWE 2K22.
It shouldn't have taken one majorly embarrassing installment and a global pandemic for 2K to finally agree to take a year off, but it did.
Thankfully the four WWE 2K games released since have all ranked among the series' best reviewed, proving the gap year was well worth it to get the technical fundamentals in place.