Many of the developers of Just Cause are losing their jobs, and their latest open world game is being scrapped after four years of work.

Developer Avalanche Studios is having to close one of its branches completely and lay off more employees.

Avalanche Studios is responsible for games such as the Just Cause series, Mad Max, and the theHunter series. The studio has now announced that it will have to downsize its team and completely close its office in the UK.

Layoffs at Avalanche

In What is Avalanche currently working on?

The last known project was a co-op open-world game called Contraband, developed exclusively for Xbox. According to a Bloomberg report from early August 2025, however, Microsoft pulled the plug on development.

Other than this teaser, there has been no further news about the game in the four years since its announcement:

In a  official statement later only said that  “active development has been halted and the future of the project is being evaluated.”

No official connection has been made between the discontinuation of Contraband and the layoffs. Furthermore, it is not known whether Avalanche is working on another game.

Avalanche Studios is part of the Danish media conglomerate Egmont Group. This also applies to the makers of Until Dawn, Supermassive Games, for example. However, there is another developer with a similar name: Avalanche Software, which belongs to Warner Bros. and is likely familiar to many as the studio behind Hogwarts Legacy.