Less than two years after its release, WWE 2K23 has been chokeslammed into oblivion: The game's servers have been closed, meaning all online functionality, including online matches and Community Creations, will no longer work.
2K Games telegraphed the move back in September 2024, announcing that WWE 2K23 "is getting its final takedown" on January 26. Sales of the game and its virtual currency were halted on November 1, 2024. The lone bright spot is that offline modes will remain playable for anyone who owns the game.
Player counts for WW3 2K23 on PC have been hovering the low-hundreds since mid-2024, so this isn't a takedown that's going to impact a wide swath of gamers. But it's notable nonetheless for how quickly it happened: Less than two years from launch to delisting and shutdown is, in the words of PC Gamer senior editor (and pro rasslin' fan) Rich Stanton, "gobsmacking," and I'd say he's not wrong: If I bought this game a year ago, I might be a little furious right about now.
It's not unprecedented, though. WWE 2K22, the previous iteration of the game, had its servers closed on January 3, 2024, also less than two years after its launch on March 11, 2022. Shortly after that game's release, 2K Games quietly pulled the plug on nearly all the preceding WWE 2K games in one fell swoop—it really doesn't seem interested in keeping older games in the series around once a new version is out.
Delisting games and ending server support has become a hot-button issue for gamers over the past year. The practice itself is nothing new, but Ubisoft lit a fuse in 2024 when it pulled the plug on The Crew, rendering the game completely unplayable, even for those who'd purchased it. That ill-advised move eventually sparked the creation of Stop Killing Games, an organization calling on the governments of France and other countries to examine the legality of such server shutdowns, and hopefully do something about it. A European Citizens Initiative petition to that end has thus far attracted more than 403,000 sigantures.
The WWE 2K23 shutdown and delisting isn't quite that egregious, but it's a reminder that game ownership as we've come to know it is an ephemeral thing—something Steam itself began acknowledging in October 2024 with a new disclaimer reminding people that "a purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product," which simply put means you pay for it, but you don't really own it at all.
2K Games hasn't announced WWE 2K25 yet, but we may be hearing something about it soon: WWE 2K23 and 2K24 were each officially announced in January of their respective years, and launched the following March. Assuming that pattern holds, we can also expect to see WWE 2K24 get a tombstone piledriver into offline-only play shortly thereafter.
