Take-Two Interactive Officially Takes Over WWE License

I haven't played a wrestling game since the PSX. Are the Yuke's games well made? Do they enjoyed only byfans, or are they enjoyed as good games?

why AKI is "number 1" Yuke's is Number 1 damnit!

Man, I remember way back in the day when Yuke's did Evil Zone for the PS1. That game is super hard to go back to now, but it was a ton of fun back then. It would be nice to see them do something other than wrestling titles for a bit.

Just make a WWE AllStars sequel and all will be well.

As long as "creative rabbi/bullshit artist" Cory Ledesma is far away from the game it will be better off.

Get some rockstar writers

I wish they would make a game more like No Mercy or Wrestle Mania 2000.

It's too bad they're keeping Yuke's, but I suspect it's more because of the yearly schedule than anything else that WWE games tend to be crap. They need to go to a two-year cycle, if not a three-year cycle.

Twenty-five dollars, you mean. I haven't paid full-price for this thing in years. Amazon always price-drops it on Black Friday about three weeks after it comes out.

Of course, you could make the argument that I'm still paying about fifteen dollars too much here. Which, now that I think about it, would be a pretty easily-made argument and is kind of depressing.

Saw this coming, it seems like a nice fit. Sort of surprised that Yukes is staying though.

The still yukes part bums me.

@meowshi: To be fair, the sport hasn't yet been removed from the Olympic games. The IOC only recommended that it be. It's up to FILA and others to fight for inclusion for the 2020 games.

This is ridiculous on so many levels, namely in the belief that an amateur wrestler would somehow take this as a sign of respect. No one refers to the combat sport of Olympic/Collegiate wrestling as "professional wrestling", and if you did, they would think you were making fun of them.

Stubbornly refusing to call people who make their living wrestling "professionals", is a slight, whether you mean it to be or not.

Besides, now that the International Olympic Committee has removed wrestling from the games, those amateur wrestlers better start training for MMA. Only way they are going to "professionally" do anything these days.

If they aren't getting rid of Yukes, who gives a shit?

Fucking absurd that anyone would be excited about this. Oh well, it's your sixty dollars.

Most unfortunate.

over on PWInsiderElite, there report comes from the court hearing, and as long as this deal is finalized Yukes is on the WWE franchise til 2017, so at that point take two could find another developer if they're not satisfied with Yukes anymore. just thought i'd pass that along.

Yukes is going to keep doing them? Damn.

I think Yuke's still has some good games in them, but the annual nature of the series is killing them. '12 and '13 were the first games I've bought consecutively in long time, and aside from the Attitude Era stuff they changed barely anything; Universe is slightly more customizable and a ton of new bugs were introduced, that's about it. I hope they do take this year off, come up with some new features and take the time to actually put it through QA.

Yukes is not a good developer at this point. These games really do feel just like they did back when the series started on the PSOne. They look terrible, too. It's insane that a(n otherwise broken game) like Wrestlemania 21 on the Xbox has superior character models to WWE '13, and the former was a game that came out in late 2004.

I am really hoping that we see 2K go in-house or farm out to a new developer. It's insane to me that AKI/synSophia were the publishers left in the dust by THQ so many years ago.

I do hope, though, that whatever developer gets ahold of these games decides to steal that multi-player season mode from WWE RAW 2. The game itself was garbage, but that mode was so good that my friends and I overlooked the crappy engine.

Not that I want people to lose their jobs or anything, but I wish they would hire on a new staff of folks to work on these games. Would love to see a new take on the series. Whatever they do I hope it stops being an annual game and goes bi annual at least.

Would love to see a wrestling RPG.

is it just me or is giantbomb always 2-3 days behind the news cycle and even then they only cover the stuff they want to cover. They should just stop doing news and focus on opinion.

Shame that Yuke's is being kept on as the developer, meaning that issue of the games not being fun won't get fixed any time soon. But hey, Vince has gotta earn back that $100 million in failed campaign funding somehow.

That is pretty much guaranteed to be the last thing to happen since they are keeping Yuke's.

Fuck Yuke's, fuck AKI, fuck whoever is has Fire Pro (Spike, still?). Give it to a NEW developer so we can try to get something we haven't seen before. I'm more than willing to excuse a "rebuilding" year if it means we finally get something interesting the next time around.

I'm thinking more like that Blood Bowl turn-based fantasy football-ish game. Is that what we're talking about? I have heard far dumber ideas. I think it would be far more interesting than a real-time crappy-looking game with two guys groping each other with extreme clipping and poor looking models. By the nature of the game's art-style, you'd be able to get away with a hell of a lot.

Your idea is one of those "wait, why hasn't that already been done?!" types of ideas.

I'm not being sarcastic about it being fake wrestling. It is fake wrestling. It is also not a sport. The primary element of sport is competition, which isn't choreographed and doesn't have a pre-determined outcome. Ballerinas and stuntmen are very skilled, have great physical prowess, and are subjected to serious injuries. Both are in entertainment; not sports. The same is true of fake wrestling. I also don't call it pro wrestling, because that's not what it is. Pro boxing is boxing, but for money. Pro wrestling is nothing like wrestling in any way imaginable.

Referring to it as fake doesn't deter from the skill and dedication it requires. It's just an acknowledgement of what it actually is. I'm not a fan of it (because a bunch of grown men in costumes performing a soap opera where even during an actual match, they only get around to performing a move every couple of minutes and generally look like a bunch of sweaty sloths crawling around on the ground or stumbling around the ring, as if they forget they're actually fighting another living thing, so they better hurry the fuck up and get to it) -- but I know plenty of people who are and that's fine (though that doesn't stop me from generalizing about wrestling fans, the same way one would Walmart clientele or Twilight fans).

I wrestled for fifteen years (and think that real wrestling is also very stupid) and grew up around a couple "pro" wrestlers who were friends of the family (one, a certain kilt-wearing badass who owned a car shop called "Piper's Pit" in southeast Portland). I don't refer to it as "fake" out of some pompous slight, but out of respect to real wrestlers as well as real athletes in actual sports, in general. If pro boxing was totally fake, I'd refer to it as fake-boxing, too. (Okay, too be fair, pro boxing isn't fake, but there have been a number of cases where it has been orchestrated -- at least with a specific determined outcome for the benefit of promoting one fighter or another, so that's borderline, too!).

Anyway, the point of my comment about fake wrestling and the games being kind of dumb is because it's sort of weird to have a simulation of a simulation. The same way it's kind of weird (and boring) to play a paintball videogame. A simulation of a simulation of gun fighting. I mean, the idea of playing a game that simulates a thing where dudes stand around a ring doing nothing 80% of the time is . . . silly.

I also find the final product of most wrestling games over time to have been pretty bad. I used to think it was a technical limitation that we hadn't overcome yet, but boxing games have really done well in the last few years. The wrestling games always seem to have terrible animations, poor animated body interactions, ugly character models, and tons of clipping. I might even consider playing it sometime, if it didn't just look like an endless stream of graphical glitches occurring in a ring (think of the lame and disjointed animations when, for example, getting a guy in a head-and-arm or lifting him from the ground to perform some sort of ludicrous throw.

If the duders ever get a chance, I would actually love to have them ask a developer of one of these wrestling games about this. About what challenges and limitations they actual face in animating the models and making them interact in a way that (should, but doesn't) look realistic. I've kind of just always made the assumption that it was due to low budgets and shitty developers.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

I was never into wrestling games but maybe they can do something good with it.

I'm at the very least glad the 20 THQ WWE production staff members got to keep on with their jobs, that's really good to hear.

This series has been long in need of an overhaul, and annual releases prevented that, best thing that could have happened to it tbh

I used to love games like wrestlemania 2000, no mercy, and some of the smack downs on the ps2 so I'm interested in what 2k will bring.

@branthog: Can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not,about the "fake" wrestling thing anyway.Like I don't want to be "that" guy but yea that's a pretty bad term mainly cause you are putting your body at risk everytime and injuries are serious,like any other sport.I guess it gets lost though with all the televised broadcasts and recent softening of the sport.

Then boy have I got a game for you!

it just sounds like they need to make new contracts between Yukes,WWE, and Take-Two to make things official. I wouldn't get my hopes up about it

Yer damn tootin'! I would just like to see some WWE themed games that don't always have to be a wrestling sim. As much as I do really enjoy the technical aspects of pro wrestling they've got all these fun characters that you could use to do some really wild shit.

Not to steal any thunder, but here's the original Bloomberg article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-13/take-two-to-take-over-development-of-wwe-games-from-thq.html

This might be the best news I've heard in this whole THQ dissolving thing. Which is actually kind of messed up now that I think about it, that I'm excited for a game because of who isn't working on it.

Oh God can you imagine. Whoever works on the game, I hope they take it in a totally different direction.

Give Yukes a 2-year development cycle. The next game would be the perfect game to start. Skip the annual game and naming convention and rebrand the series for a next gen debut.

WWF ERA GAMES, get some rockstar people working on that game

Word is Yukes has been future endeavored.

"Bloomberg reported that Take Two Interactive will take over THQ's WWE series, the company will develop and publish future WWE titles; previous agreement between THQ and Yukes' will be terminated and Yukes' will no longer be working on the series."

via GAF http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=47717139&postcount=196

That is one of the dumbest fucking ideas I have ever heard in my entire life. Which is precisely why it needs to happen as soon as possible.

Knew if they were doing a 2014 game they wouldn't be able to ditch Yukes, there is just not enough time for that. Maybe they can experiment with it later down the road.

They should just go ahead and put all focus on improving the story creator.

Screw up? Take-Two can pretty much just fix the franchise at this point.

I'll say it until I'm blue in the face. Take the frame work of a Strategy RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics and throw the WWE licence on it. THINK IT ABOUT IT MAN. You could really blow out and exaggerate everyone's persona's give them all sorts of wild abilities and shit. I will continue my useless one man petition for this until the end of time.

Now it's time for Darksiders. Come on Crytek Austin, pwetty pwease :3

It's too bad Yukes is staying. I was really hoping for a ground up rebuild... The series has been stale for a VERY long time.

I would like to see this series on PC I hate wrestling today but I'm nostalgic for some 90's era wrestling I like that this series has a mode like that at least in the current one.

@branthog: Judging the quality of the game is fine, and necessary (as you can you by my previous post), but you seem to go out of your way to come across as condescending and rude in a comments section that has been filled with people speaking normally. I really don't care what you've done in your past, it doesn't change the fact that your approach to your comments were a bit callous.

My only request is you show respect to the people. Shit on the games all you please, I know I have plenty. They have been terrible for a long, long time.