It seems we won't be seeing a royal rumble this year after all. After rampant speculation over the last week about 2K Games canceling this year's WWE title, the wresting company confirmed as much in a quarterly report today. When questioned about a new game releasing this year, WWE's Frank Riddick (interim CFO) stated, "there's not going to be a launch of a game this year."
This isn't a particularly surprising development. For the past few years, 2K Games has put out some seriously subpar entries. WWE 2K18 on Switch was an outright disaster and last year's 2K20 was slammed on social media for its plethora of bugs. It seems the departure of developer Yukes, the change to developer Visual Concepts, and the scramble to get a new team together likely couldn't be resolved to create a new entry this year.
For whatever reason, none of the entries on PS4 and Xbox One have been particularly good for WWE 2K. The very first next-gen release, 2K15, launched weeks after its last-gen version and was missing a pretty large amount of features. The trend kept going with each new game adding something back, but breaking performance in the process. If a year off is required to finally get this series back into order, then that's worth missing an annual release.
Source: Polygon