Just Cause creator Cristofer Sundberg left Avalanche Studios, which he had co-founded, in late 2020 to create his own company, Liquid Swords. The studio is working on a GTA-like open world game that was first shown to the world last year. Recently, it has shared around ten seconds of new in-game footage to keep players intrigued about the untitled project.
However, a few hours ago, Sundberg returned to the topic of Just Cause. In a series of tweets published on X, he stated that it is unlikely we'll see a fifth mainline installment from Avalanche Studios.
Me and my team pitched Contraband back in 2017 to MSFT (and signed it). It's changed quite a lot since then, obviously, but it would have been fantastic to see it being released one day somehow. Just Cause 5 would be a no-go since extremely few from the original team are there still.
It's a qualified guess. The problems with JC4 was partly me (unwillingly) moving away from creative leadership to more corporate crap, publisher problems, team composition and roles and more. Sad, because looking at JC4 now, it shows SO much promise.
When a follower told him that Just Cause 5 would save the company, Sundberg replied:
I doubt it. They need to find the fire again, take risks, piss people off and make games the rest said was impossible. I started Avalanche to break the mold, not to fit into one.
Indeed, the Swedish development studio has fallen on hard times lately. The aforementioned Contraband project was eventually shut down by Microsoft in August, which led to the closure of the Liverpool office and to layoffs at the Stockholm and Malmö teams. In June 2024, Avalanche Studios had already closed offices in Montréal and New York, laying off another fifty employees.
The last franchise entry to be released is 2018's Just Cause 4, which received mixed reviews. In Wccftech's review, Nathan Birch wrote:
Ultimately, I found Just Cause 4 was most satisfying when I hopped in a chopper or found a good gliding spot and just took a minute to appreciate the world Avalanche has built. These quiet moments were a nice vacation from the rest of the game, although the fact that I needed that escape maybe isn’t a rousing endorsement.
The game also failed commercially. Publisher Square Enix would later admit that its sales did not cover development costs.
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