This all comes just a year after the corporation’s terrible handling of Them’s Fightin’ Herds
Licensed fighting games based on popular anime and cartoons used to be all the rage, but although they’ve largely disappeared outside of Arc System Works and platform fighters like MultiVersus, there looked to be a big new one on the horizon.
That appears to no longer be the case, however, with an Avatar: The Last Airbender fighting game canceled by Maximum Entertainment.
The Avatar fighting game was only just announced this past February by Maximum as part of the corporation’s 2024 roadmap and one of their big new projects in the works.
“Finally, we are thrilled to announce that we have entered into a partnership with Paramount Consumer Products to develop a competitive multiplayer fighting game set in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe,” the CEO, Christina Seelye, said.
Despite her promise of them having “much more to share on this game in the future” and giving Avatar a 2025 early access launch window, it doesn’t look like the game is happening at all anymore.
This comes in Maximum’s recent quarterly financial report where they revealed their net sales were down 32% year over year for the quarter while the company’s operating expenses rose about 35%.
That included a write-down for canceled projects and underperforming launch titles.
Among those were Avatar and at least two other projects.
“The write-down is a result of impairment test during the quarter on games and includes canceled projects and underperforming launched titles,” reads the financial report. “Of the 13.2 MEUR write-down amount 9 MEUR canceled titles Mudfest, Project Velos and Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
No other mention is made of popular animated series featuring Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko, Toph and dozens of other memorable characters that could make a very interesting fighting game roster.
Between that announcement and this apparent cancelation, it seems no footage was ever shown off of the Avatar game in action, so we don’t even know what kind of title it would have been.
Maximum described it as a “competitive multiplayer fighting game,” which would be a rather odd way to talk about a traditional fighter, so that left a lot of questions as to what Avatar would have looked like.
The Last Airbender could have been a traditional 2D or 3D fighter, but there’s also a strong chance it would have dipped more into the arena fighter category.
With a focus on competitive gameplay, Maximum could have been looking to other titles like Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker and Dissidia Final Fantasy NT to expand into team-based content.
We may never know the answer to that now or who even was actually developing Avatar.
Many fighting game fans were also wary about the initial announcement because of Maximum’s involvement.
Just months before the reveal, Maximum had ended active development and canceled the Story Mode promised for Them’s Fightin’ Herds, which led to backlash and calls for refunds.
Mind you, this Story Mode was a funded stretch goal for Them’s Fightin’ Herds’ crowdfunding campaign years before Maximum was ever in the picture.
The corporation then effectively laid off the entire development team at Mane6 before the final two DLC characters were completed.
This led to the game’s last fighters releasing in an absurdly busted state that took months to “fix,” which didn’t even patch out all of the issues.
Thus, Them’s Fightin’ Herds went out on a very sour note after years of progress and a built-up dedicated community of players and fans left with broken promises along with a team of developers left devastated they had to leave what brought them together in such a state.
So expectations around the fighting game community weren’t very high and for apparently good reason.
Avatar is a series that deserves good video games and good fighting games, but it’s had a surprisingly rough track record outside of maybe the Platinum Legend of Korra game, which you can’t even buy anymore.
And then there’s Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Burning Earth that lives on with a claim to fame simply because players could unlock all 1,000 achievement points in mere minutes on the Xbox 360.
This project is not related to the other Avatar game in development by Saber Interactive said to be a AAA action-RPG and the biggest in the franchise’s history, so all hope is not lost after this cancelation, the Netflix live-action series and alleged new series leaks popping up online currently.
If you truly want to knock heads with Aang, Korra, Azula, and Zuko, your best choice remains Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2.