Just Cause devs Avalanche shut down UK studio amid wider cuts after Microsoft's shelving of Contraband

"We volition trim our workforce and restructure the teams to code our games' needs"

Just Cause developers Avalanche Studios are cutting unit and closing their Liverpool, UK-based workplace pursuing Microsoft's cancellation of co-op smuggling crippled Contraband.

Avalanche announced Contraband backmost successful June 2021 successful the signifier of a trailer replete with lockboxes, scribbly heist maps and Steely Dan music. There followed respective years of astir implicit silence, breached by quality that implicit 500 Swedish unit had formed a national successful April 2024 - portion of a question of games manufacture labour activism successful the look of widespread, "post-Covid" job-chopping.

The positivity was not to last. In June 2024, Avalanche laid disconnected 50 radical and closed their New York and Montreal studios to guarantee "a unchangeable and sustainable aboriginal for the company". Then, successful August this year, Microsoft called clip connected Contraband, soon aft laying disconnected a clump of Xbox developers and cancelling specified games arsenic Rare's Everwild and The Initiative's reboot of Perfect Dark.

Back then, Avalanche commented that "active improvement has present stopped portion we measure the project's future". There's been immoderate disagreement betwixt Microsoft and reporters implicit whether the crippled is afloat dead, oregon simply "on hold". I ideate it'll beryllium connected clasp for a while, if they aren't immoderate developers to enactment connected it.

Avalanche's connection astir this week's reductions alludes to "current challenges to our concern and the industry", but doesn't notation Contraband. The institution suggest to adjacent their Liverpool studio, with a corporate consultation process arsenic required by UK law. "The changes volition besides interaction our different workplace locations successful Malmő and Stockholm," the connection continues, "where we volition trim our workforce and restructure the teams to code our games' needs."

Best of luck to everybody affected.