Another One Bites the Dust: Avalanche Gets Gutted After Xbox Cans Contraband
In today's edition of "The AAA Industry is Fine, We Swear," another studio gets its guts ripped out after a publisher pulls the plug.
Avalanche Studios, the folks behind the gloriously chaotic Just Cause series and the criminally underrated Mad Max, just announced a brutal round of mass layoffs. This bloodletting comes right after Microsoft finally put their long-suffering exclusive, Contraband, out of its misery back in July. You don’t need to be a seasoned analyst to connect these dots.
Four Years of Nothing
Let’s be honest, Contraband has been a ghost for years. It was announced with a slick teaser back in 2021, billed as a "co-op smuggler’s paradise set in the fictional world of 1970s Bayan". Then, absolute radio silence. For four years, we got nothing. No gameplay, no developer diaries, not even a goddamn screenshot.
In this industry, that kind of silence is never a good sign. It doesn’t mean a team is just quietly "cooking." It means something is deeply, fundamentally broken behind the scenes.
The Axe Falls (Again)
Today, the bill came due. In a statement filled with the usual corporate platitudes about "current challenges," Avalanche announced it's closing its Liverpool studio and cutting staff in Malmo and Stockholm. This isn't their first rodeo, either. They already shuttered their New York and Montreal studios just last year, axing 50 jobs in the process.
They called it an "exceptionally difficult decision" necessary for a "stable and sustainable future". We've all heard that one before. It's the industry's go-to line before they show hundreds of talented people the door.
Who's to Blame?
It’s easy, and frankly not entirely wrong, to point the finger at the big green machine. Xbox's management of its studios and partnerships has been a fucking train wreck for years. They seem to love announcing games that are little more than a concept and a prayer, giving teams endless freedom with zero direction, and then acting shocked when a finished product never materializes. A big team needs structure. It needs deadlines. Otherwise, what’s stopping you from floating in development hell forever?
A Two-Way Street of Failure
But let's not let Avalanche completely off the hook here. As much as Xbox management sucks, a studio can't just burn through a publisher's money for half a decade and have absolutely nothing to show for it. At some point, you have to deliver something. Four years without a single gameplay snippet isn't just a red flag; it's a catastrophic failure of project management.
This isn't a case of a publisher not giving a studio the time it needs to create a masterpiece. This feels like a project that was doomed from the start, kept alive by milestone payments while everyone involved knew it was going nowhere.
Ultimately, this is a classic industry tragedy where no one comes out looking good. It’s a story of a publisher with negligent management and a developer that couldn't deliver a product. And, as always, the only real losers are the tens of people now out of a job, paying the price for failures far above their pay grade.