adminThe Avalanche Studios game development strategy is shifting toward early experimentation and regular player feedback. Rather than committing significant resources to a single concept before knowing whether it resonates, the studio is testing small, playable prototypes with a dedicated community. Chief publishing officer Emma Farrow says the approach is intended to help the company validate ideas sooner and make better-informed decisions about which projects deserve further development.
That change comes after a difficult period for the company, including studio closures, layoffs and project changes. Avalanche is now using a structured research and development process to explore new games while keeping early teams small and development decisions tied to audience feedback.
Image credit: Avalanche Studios/Square Enix
Avalanche Studios’ game development strategy follows a challenging period
Avalanche Studios Group closed its Montreal and New York offices in 2024, then shut its Liverpool studio in 2025. The Liverpool location had opened in 2020. The group now has around 400 employees across its Stockholm and Malmö offices. Avalanche Studios should not be confused with Avalanche Software, the Utah-based developer of Hogwarts Legacy.
The company is known for the Just Cause series, but its most recent main entry, Just Cause 4, launched in 2018. A planned mobile spin-off was later cancelled. Avalanche also developed the 2015 Mad Max game and worked on 2019’s Rage 2 for Bethesda. Although Mad Max received mixed reviews at launch, it has since gained a following among players who consider it an overlooked game.
Avalanche’s Systemic Reaction division developed Generation Zero, which launched in 2019 and has since been improved through updates. The game initially received a Metacritic score of 51. Systemic Reaction also released Second Extinction in 2020, but the title was cancelled before leaving Early Access, and launched Ravenbound in 2023. According to SteamDB, Ravenbound’s concurrent player count fell to 45 about a month after release.
Farrow says the company, like others in the games industry, has had to make difficult choices to support the business’s long-term sustainability. Project changes included ending support for Generation Zero, which she said no longer made sense to maintain. Microsoft also paused development on Contraband, a co-op heist game revealed in 2021 that Avalanche was developing and Xbox Game Studios was publishing. Farrow did not confirm whether the pause was directly connected to layoffs, noting that staffing needs must be aligned with the projects in development.
TheHunter: Call of the Wild remains a key title
One of Avalanche’s strongest performers is TheHunter: Call of the Wild, developed by its Expansive Worlds division and released in 2017. Farrow describes it as the company’s flagship, with more than 29 million base-game copies distributed. That figure does not include players accessing the game through Game Pass. The title has also received downloadable content over the years.
Farrow says the United States is the game’s primary market, while China is also home to a substantial audience. Its continued reach gives Avalanche an established title as the studio develops and tests ideas for its future portfolio.
TheHunter: Call of the Wild launched in 2017.
How Avalanche tests game ideas before full production
Farrow says Avalanche’s development approach has changed substantially in recent years. The goal is to address three common challenges: making a game its intended audience will enjoy, standing out in a crowded market and controlling the cost of bringing a title to release.
The company has built an R&D pipeline that gives small groups a chance to pitch game concepts to studio leadership. When a pitch is approved, a five-person team gets four months to create a playable prototype. Avalanche then shares the prototype with its Frontrunners community for feedback and evaluation.
Frontrunners is a player community Avalanche has assembled around people’s gaming interests and preferred genres. It currently has about 3,000 members and is growing. Farrow says members are not simply recruited as conventional playtesters: the platform is intended to help players discover games while giving Avalanche qualitative feedback and player-behaviour data, or telemetry.
At the four-month point, the studio considers whether a prototype has demonstrated a fun core and whether it appears to be on the right track. If it has, the team can continue developing it and return to the community for further testing at four-month intervals. Farrow says the long-term aim is to have around five games in this process at any one time.
The approach differs from starting a large project on the assumption that an audience will emerge later. As Farrow puts it, Avalanche wants to enter the market because it has evidence of an audience, rather than hoping to find one after the fact. For readers assessing a game announcement, that distinction matters: prototypes and community tests are early-stage development work, not confirmation that a title will eventually launch.
A deliberate process for stopping weaker prototypes
Not every idea continues. Farrow says Avalanche has already stopped work on quite a few projects, and she sees that as evidence that the process is serving its purpose. The aim is to identify concepts that do not meet expectations while the teams and budgets are still relatively small.
Despite the survival-of-the-fittest comparison, Farrow says the system is designed to encourage entrepreneurship rather than rivalry. There is a limit to the number of prototypes the studio can support at once, but no fixed cap on how many games might eventually be approved. A project may use a prototype slot for four or eight months; when it moves forward or stops, the slot becomes available to another idea. Team members may also move between projects.
Ideas can come from anyone in the organization, not only designers. Farrow says people from legal, marketing and other teams can pitch concepts. When a project is stopped, the work can still inform future attempts: developers learn what did and did not work, and later prototypes may reuse code or ideas where appropriate.
Just Cause 4, released in 2018, is the latest entry in a series that began in 2006. Image credit: Avalanche Studios/Square Enix
Applying a mobile development model to PC and console
Avalanche’s process has similarities to established mobile-game development practices. Mobile studios often test concepts with audiences early, and some projects are discontinued during soft launch rather than progressing to a wider release. Farrow says her own background includes mobile games and that the iterative approach of testing, learning and adjusting feels familiar to her.
She believes this kind of audience testing has been less common in PC and console development. The wider industry has already adopted some practices associated with mobile, including free-to-play models, though that shift has had both positive and negative effects. Avalanche is now exploring whether early, repeated testing can also help console and PC projects find an audience before large-scale production.
One concern about audience-led development is that it could favour familiar ideas and make unusual concepts harder to approve. Farrow says Avalanche’s games can be highly creative, provided there is an audience for them. She also argues that players want something distinct from what they already play, so feedback can encourage teams to take a different direction rather than simply copy established hits.
For now, Avalanche is focusing on simulation and action, genres in which the company has experience. Farrow describes the intended space for its self-published games as polished AA. The full program has been operating for about a year, and the studio is approaching the point where its most promising candidate could enter full production. The initiative’s success, however, will only be clear once a resulting game reaches players.
Mad Max has developed a reputation among some players as an underrated game. Image credit: Avalanche Studios/Warner Bros. Games
Frontrunners may also support external teams
Avalanche is opening its Frontrunners platform to outside development teams because the company’s internal staff can generate only a limited number of pitches. External developers can bring a game concept to the platform and use a testing process similar to the one Avalanche applies to its own prototypes.
Avalanche will not fund external developers through this initiative. Instead, it will provide access to feedback and data from the Frontrunners community. Farrow did not provide details about whether Avalanche might publish games from outside teams. She said the initiative could help shape the company’s future portfolio and provide useful information about genres Avalanche is also interested in developing internally.
The community has mostly grown through word of mouth, with some user acquisition and recruitment. Avalanche hopes to expand it substantially in 2026. More participants could give developers a broader pool of feedback, although the value of the results will depend on recruiting players who match each game’s intended audience.
Testing earlier to reduce development uncertainty
Farrow says long development cycles can lose direction when important questions are put to players too late. She describes a common pattern in which a project builds momentum, reaches a middle stage, then needs to revisit earlier decisions after its first substantial player test. Avalanche’s process aims to bring that validation forward, while the team is small and changes are less costly.
In one example, a team tested several versions of similar gameplay within an eight-month period, moving from 3v3 to 5v5 before considering another configuration. That kind of iteration lets developers compare options and adjust the concept relatively quickly. It does not guarantee that no further changes will be needed in pre-production or production, but the goal is to address the hardest creative questions earlier.
For players, the practical takeaway is that a prototype community can influence a game well before release, but early testing is not a promise of a finished product. For developers, the model offers a way to gather feedback, examine player data and reassess a concept before committing to a larger team and budget.
What Avalanche Studios’ game development strategy means for its future
Avalanche’s new process is designed to balance creative freedom with evidence from players. Small teams build prototypes, Frontrunners members provide feedback, and concepts that do not show promise can be stopped before full production. The studio is also exploring whether external teams can benefit from the same community-testing platform.
The approach cannot guarantee a hit, and Avalanche’s results will ultimately depend on whether a game developed through the process succeeds with players after launch. Still, the Avalanche Studios game development strategy gives the company a structured way to test ideas earlier, learn from cancelled prototypes and decide where to invest its development resources.
This article was updated to clarify Emma Farrow’s response about funding and support for external developers.
