While players and press had their eyes on Summer Game Fest, Paramount quietly revealed on Friday evening it axed a previously announced Avatar: The Last Airbender game.
This title, first revealed in 2024, was courtesy of Saber, the studio behind Space Marine II. IGN reports the project, dubbed Ice Wars, would’ve focused on a previously unseen master of the four elements and set thousands of years in the past. It was to be an action-RPG and a boon to Saber’s list of IP-based games, which has since expanded to include John Wick and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.
But it was not to be, as Paramount Games Studio’s creative head Shawn Kittelsen told IGN the project wasn’t in production when the subsidiary was set up. PGS was formed to unify Paramount and Skydance’s video game teams, and decided to nix the Avatar game once all was settled. Kittelsen explained that games used to be a “sub-department” for Paramount Skydance, whereas it’s now its own business unit. “We’re accountable for driving revenue and building games,” he said. While the company “wants to see things through,” that currently only applies to PlatinumGames’ recently announced Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin, which was being done by Black Forest Games pre-Paramount/Skydance merger.
Kittelsen added that a triple-A Avatar game “might come in a different iteration,” and there’s the fighting game due out in July. But that doesn’t take away from this cancellation serving as more evidence that Paramount has never really known what to do with this franchise. Everyone knows it, and should the studio succeed in owning more IP and Hollywood real estate, Avatar might not be the only property to go through these troubles.
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