Tony Khan Responds To Critics Of AEW’s Video Game Investment

Last week, an article in Forbes revealed that the only thing keeping AEW from being profitable at the moment is a significant investment made into developing a video game.

“Khan expects its wrestling division to be profitable this year, though an eight-figure investment in video game development will keep the company in the red for now,” an excerpt from the article reads.

Tony Khan recently spoke to PW Insider about how that investment will eventually lead to big returns for his company. He also commented on those who have been critical of the investment.

“I’ve made this huge investment into video games and it’s comical to me that anybody would try to pull it… it goes to show that I think people will try and take a negative out of a positive sometimes because this is a hugely positive thing,” Khan said.

The game won’t be released until next year. Therefore, the money spent on developing it won’t yield a return until at least 2022. This is the reason why AEW won’t show a profit in 2021.

“I have made this huge eight figure investment into video games, but we won’t see any revenue from that until 2022. That’s why it’s not going to pay off in 2021 on our books,” Khan said.

Khan continued to talk about AEW approaching profitability so quickly.

“Our wrestling company is very profitable. The only reason I won’t net money this year on AEW in our second full year of operations, which is pretty amazing, frankly, for a startup that has had the level of investment that we’ve had behind AEW and the amount of time that this has been going, that we’ll be significantly profitable already as a venture.”

Khan also noted, however, that it’s not just about making money. He is very proud at the way they have conducted business throughout the pandemic.

“I care about running a profitable business, but I also take a lot of pride in the fact that I didn’t lay people off through the pandemic. Almost everybody, we have a over 95% retention rate of people through the pandemic and I actually had significantly higher than 95%. Almost everybody that we started with is here,” he continued.