Four years after its first E3 announcement, a Bloomberg story claims that Xbox has canceled the game’s production in order to “evaluate the project’s future.”
According to insiders, “Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence,” Jason Schreier, a journalist for Bloomberg, was the first to report the news on Bluesky today.
Avalanche then posted an official confirmation on its website, which says the following:
Xbox Game Studios Publishing and Avalanche Studios Group have worked together on Contraband for a number of years. As we assess the project’s future, active development has now ceased. We appreciate the enthusiasm the community has shown since our announcement and will provide an update as soon as possible on our plans.
A teaser trailer for Contraband was first released during E3 2021 for the Xbox and PC. We didn’t witness any gameplay at the time, but we did know it would take place in Bayan, a smuggler’s paradise from the 1970s. Since that time, we haven’t seen or heard anything more about the game’s development. We did note, however, that in 2022, a contentious hiring decision and a subsequent lack of communication between management and staff led to a disagreement that eventually prompted the studio to establish an official union club and placed pressure on the business to sign a collective bargaining agreement.
Amidst a big layoff that resulted in the elimination of 9,100 positions throughout Microsoft last month, including hundreds in the gaming industry, Xbox has been scrapping projects left and right. Following the incident, we found out that titles like Perfect Dark and Everwild had been canceled.
