It was an incredibly messy day for Microsoft yesterday. There were headlines after headlines about studios experiencing layoffs and game cancellations. We’re still seeing some reports emerge from this round of layoffs that occurred within the company. However, one game that remains a mystery regarding its current production status is Contraband.
We don’t know the full extent of this latest round of layoffs that Microsoft is experiencing yet. One project that could be finding itself no longer in the works is Contraband. X user, olvier_drk, found that the game announcement trailer on the official Xbox YouTube channel was removed. Now, speculation is running rampant as to whether Avalanche Studios is no longer developing this project.
For those unaware, Avalanche Studios is the folks behind the Just Cause franchise, and their latest game to hit the marketplace was 2019’s Rage 2. Contraband is their current project, published under Xbox, which is still supposedly in development; however, we haven’t seen any gameplay footage for it yet. Instead, we’re working off a CGI trailer and little tidbits of information.
We knew that this was set to be a co-op heist-style game set in the 1970s. However, as noted, the trailer has since been removed, leaving us wondering what’s going on. It’s possible that the game was scrapped after Microsoft decided to scale back on several projects. For instance, we recently reported that Romero Games was forced to cancel their upcoming AAA FPS game after discovering that Bethesda had decided to back out as the game’s publisher. That said, the cancellation of Romero Games’ FPS title appears to have led to the entire studio being shut down.
That might not be the case for Avalanche Studios. As others have noted online, this could have been a move due to the expiration of the music licensing deal used in the trailer. So, for now, we’ll have to wait and see if there’s any official word regarding whether we can still expect Contraband at some point or if this was another game that was shelved.
