Just Cause 5 would be a ‘no go’ according to the series’ creator, as ‘extremely few from the original team’ remain at Avalanche Studios

It’s been seven years since Avalanche Studios last released a Just Cause game. The series that put the Swedish studio on the map has been missing in action since 2018, and if the words of its creator are anything to go by, we won’t be seeing another one any time soon, if ever.

In a post on X discussing Avalanche Studios’ cancelled game Contraband, Cristofer Sundberg stated that Swedish studio would be unlikely to make a fifth Just Cause game due to the fact that the majority of the series’ key creatives have since departed the studio.

Sundberg, who left Avalanche Studios in 2019, said that Just Cause 5 ‘would be a no-go since extremely few from the original team are there still.”

Now, it doesn’t immediately follow that changes in personnel means a developer will stop iterating upon a particular series. None of Doom’s original creators still work at id Software, for example, but the studio keeps making great spins on its world-changing FPS. Sundberg, however, believes that the will to make Just Cause games left with the series’ key creators, a problem he says became evident during the creation of Just Cause 4.

Describing his earlier assertion as a “qualified guess,” Sundberg elaborates that “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.”

Avalanche Studios has certainly experienced some challenges lately, though you could argue they aren’t entirely the studio’s fault. Contraband, which was unveiled in 2021 in a partnership with Xbox and pitched as a 1970s smuggling sim, was axed shortly after Microsoft’s mass layoffs back in August. Two months later, Avalanche closed its Liverpool-based studio and laid off employees at both its Malmo and Stockholm offices.

Prior to that, Avalanche’s recent record was not great, but not terrible either. Just Cause 4 was a miss with players, though Robert Zak felt warmer toward it in his Just Cause 4 review. Subsequent updates helped improve its reputation among the wider community. Likewise, the cooperative survival sim Generation Zero was underwhelming on launch, with Andy Kelly awarding it a score of 67 in his Generation Zero Review, but it sold relatively well and has improved its standing since its launch in 2019.

It’s also worth noting that Sundberg’s new studio, Liquid Swords, has faced problems of its own. Having yet to reveal its debut game, the developer laid off an unspecified number of people earlier this year, citing “shifting market conditions” as the cause. Development of this unnamed game—which Liquid Swords describes as a “narrative-driven, open-world, hardboiled AAA revenge story” on its website—is still ongoing, however, with the studio’s official X account recently posting a short clip of that open-world in motion.