WWE 2K26 Makes Huge Changes To It’s Controversial Ringside Pass Following Widespread Fan Backlash

Developer Visual Concepts and publisher 2K have made sweeping changes to the post-launch content model in WWE 2K26 following considerable negative feedback from fans and critics.

As outlined in a blog post on the game’s official website, WWE 2K26’s Ringside Pass will be altered to, hopefully, make earning content that you’ve paid for less of a chore. As of today, all players will be granted enough RXP to unlock 20 tiers, ensuring that all four DLC wrestlers will be unlocked, leaving only cosmetics, standard wrestlers, and other bonuses ahead of you. In addition to this, any player who signs into the game with a linked 2K account before April 14 will also have 20 tiers unlocked for Season 2 of the Ringside Pass.

A once-off is great and all, but more permanent changes have also been put in place. Starting with Season 2 and continuing thereafter, the RXP required to advance a tier will be reduced from 800 to 625, which should lessen the grind somewhat. More importantly, the four DLC characters are all being moved to the first tier of the Ringside pass, making them available to Season Pass holders on day one. These are positive changes, to be sure; I’m just hoping they continue with this line of thought and don’t regress in next year’s entry.

It’s also worth noting that patch 1.07, which will grant free Ringside Pass tiers, will also introduce a number of gameplay improvements, such as tweaks to the stamina system to ensure that players don’t reach the new winded state after executing only a handful of moves. This is another great change that players are sure to appreciate.

For the past few years, Visual Concepts has been doing an incredible job of rehabilitating the WWE 2K series after the disastrous release of WWE 2K20. We’ve seen innovations in gameplay and presentation gain traction with each passing year, resulting in some of the best wrestling games in recent memory (sorry, AEW: Fight Forever). However, as the series has gotten back on track, many fans, myself included, grew increasingly worried that 2K’s aggressive monetisation methods would start to creep in now that trust had been rebuilt.

The transition into this darkest timeline began with WWE 2K25‘s The Island mode, which offered a half-baked, wacky campaign filled with opportunities to spend money on cosmetics and stats boosts to strengthen your online wrestler. Easy enough to ignore, but troubling. Things really took a turn for the worse with this year’s iteration, WWE 2K26. Rather than continue with the tried-and-true post-launch content pipeline, where players would immediately gain access to Season Pass content upon release, Visual Concepts pivoted to a slow, restrictive, and borderline insulting battle pass scheme.

The Ringside Pass is allegedly a more engaging way to access content, with players needing to earn RXP to work their way through tiers to play as the wrestlers they paid for. This is problematic in and of itself, with a non-cosmetic battle pass being integrated into a full retail game, but the presence of paid tier skips made it downright greedy and gross. This has been widely maligned by both fans and critics, myself included. I gave WWE 2K26 a 7.5, saying in the conclusion of my review that, “Isn’t it a shame that all I can think about when I look at WWE 2K26 is how much this game wants to nickel and dime me, just for being a wrestling fan.”

The above changes are undeniably a good move, but I still worry about the future. This backtrack could, and potentially should be seen as a team listening to community feedback. However, there’s a part of me that wonders if this was always on the cards, and if 2K utilised the age-old method of giving players something awful so they’d be happy with something bad. In any event, I’m glad I can play as Psycho Clown.

What do you make of this whole Ringside Pass debacle? Let us know in the comments or on our social media.