Jason Schreier has gone and done one of those journalism things again, this time reporting that sources have informed him that Contraband will not be getting smuggled onto Xbox.
Contraband was announced in 2021 by developer Avalanche, the people behind the Just Cause series. The game was marketed as being a co-op heist game, and the initial trailer had a pretty fun vibe.
However, since its announcement, Contraband has barely been heard of except in reports of job listings and the occasional rumour. In other words, people have been speculating for a while now that the game was either in deep trouble or already cancelled.
Well, according to Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, it was still in development right up until about…well, now.
“Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News,” wrote Schreier on Bluesky. “This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles. “
The cancellations he refers to include the likes of the Project Blackbird at Zenimax Online, and Project Dark from The Initiative.
In this instance, though, it seems like Xbox may be in the right. Four years with nothing worth showing indicates some serious trouble behind the scenes. And since Contraband wasn’t a first-party Xbox title, Microsoft may not have to shoulder so much of the responsibility for its failure, unlike its other numerous cancelled games and shuttered studios where Microsoft’s own lack of management and poor decision making were likely largely to blame.