#canceled game

Contraband Resurfaces in Fishing Game, Five Years Later

Announced with fanfare in 2021 by Microsoft and Avalanche Studios, Contraband never materialized. This open-world smuggler game set on the fictional Bayan island in Southeast Asia seemed permanently shelved. Its unexpected reappearance in an indie fishing title says less about the project's survival than it does about the sorry state of Xbox's catalog in recent years: a graveyard of broken promises whose ghosts keep surfacing through the most improbable channels.