„Development has now stopped” on Contraband, Xbox and Avalanche Studios collaboration announced in 2021

Today, Stephen Totilo at Game File broke the news that “development has now stopped” on the Avalanche Studios and Xbox collaboration, Contraband. This news comes just weeks after huge and chaotic cuts at Microsoft in early July. Thankfully, this doesn’t quite seem to be an outright cancellation just yet. Xbox does not own Avalanche Studios, so they can’t shut it down completely. But to have worked on this title for at least four years, probably longer, and come up empty would be devastating.

Contraband is no longer being worked on at Xbox and Avalanche Studios

The game Contraband was announced in 2021, and at the time, it was described as an open-world co-op game about smugglers set in the 1970s in a fictional world called Bayan, according to Xbox’s website. There has been very little information revealed since that announcement, and still, there is only the original trailer, which never featured any gameplay. So, we might never truly know what this game looked like or what it could have been. The original announcement trailer has reportedly been made private on YouTube, but thankfully, other channels have uploaded it as well.

In a statement on their website, Avalanche Studios said: “Over the past several years, Avalanche Studios Group and Xbox Game Studios Publishing have collaborated on Contraband. Active development has now stopped while we evaluate the project’s future… [we] will give an update on what’s next as soon as we can.” So, even though it doesn’t sound great, it’s not an outright cancellation. There’s still hope that this game can return in some form, perhaps with a new publisher. Not unlike the team at Romero Games, who were caught up in the recent chaos at Xbox.

Where issues could arise is who owns the rights to Contraband. If it rests with Xbox, then it’s likely canceled. But if Avalanche can retain the rights and find another publisher, there is hope. Either way, it will not be an easy road for Avalanche, especially with so little public information about the game available.

Contraband

cancelled

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• Overview

• Xbox
• Avalanche Studios
• Xbox Game Studios / Microsoft Gaming