Jeff Jarrett has made many great merchandising deals behind the scenes in the world of professional wrestling, including a few video games.
All Elite Wrestling‘s Jeff Jarrett recently sat down with WrestleZone’s Managing Editor Bill Pritchard. When asked about when he first realized that video games weren’t just a hobby and could be another avenue for professional wrestling, Jarrett said he understood things like this at a very early age.
“This is an easy answer,” Jeff Jarrett said. “And Bill you’ve been around a few years like myself, but at a very early age there were several nights in my young wrestling career back in the Midwest territory that my payoff for getting paid to wrestle was less than the amount of money I made off selling pictures and merchandise.
“So from an early age, I understood that monetizing the industry wasn’t just in hard ticket sales. And then you fast forward to getting to the — in those days, it was called the WWF. And you get your royalty checks, and you look at action figures and video games. Those are obviously the leaders in the marketplace in a licensing program.
Jeff Jarrett also helped secure the deal with Midway for the TNA IMPACT video game
“Then 10 years later, I founded TNA, and we signed a deal with Midway and produced our own video game. And in reality, you just keep adding zeros in a way to the bottom line when you’re generating that type of revenue off of a licensing program. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that one day I would be the executive producer of wrestling in a JRPG game. So just the evolution of it and seeing how things have progressed.
“But at a very early age, our industry can be monetized, and it just continues. If you look at TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, there’s lots of digital revenue that can be created. The video game industry many, many years ago, was really brought into the forefront.
“I can remember being in a marketing meeting when they said you, Jeff, you do realize that video games are about as big as Hollywood, and I just kind of in my mind chuckled it off. Well, look at where we are now. It’s a massive, massive industry.”
You can watch our complete interview with Jeff Jarrett in the embedded video below.
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