The latest round of layoffs and closures in the video game industry will apparently come out of Avalanche Studios Group, the company behind games like Just Cause, Mad Max, and partly Rage 2. Avalanche Game Studios just announced that it will be shuttering its Liverpool branch and reducing the workforce in and restructuring the teams at the Malmö and Stockholm branches. It's unclear how many staff members will lose their jobs and which teams will be hit the hardest, but the game studio is justifying the layoffs as necessary for the long-term success of the company.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of the effective cancellation of Contraband, the latest Xbox-exclusive being worked on by Avalanche Studios in conjunction with Xbox Game Studios Publishing. Contraband was originally meant to be "a co-op smuggler's paradise," but Avalanche announced in August that "active development has now stopped" while the studios involved evaluated the project's future. Given today's news of workforce reductions, it seems unlikely that the game will be released anytime soon. If it's any indication, the link from the Avalanche Studios site to the Contraband official site now just redirects to the Xbox US homepage.