Maximum Entertainment Cancels Avatar: The Last Airbender Fighting Game

Maximum Entertainment gathered a resoundingly negative reputation in the FGC after the still somewhat recent news of them dropping support for Them's Fightin' Herds, and laying off the entirety of Mane6.

Shortly after, there was an announcement for the Avatar: The Last Airbender fighting game. There was no proper trailer or any sort of gameplay showcase, perhaps indicating that the early state of the project, and now our only update about it is that the game is cancelled.

The news comes from Maximum's quarterly report, which includes the following:

"R&D Expenses is up from 1.2 MEUR Q3 2023 to 15.3 MEUR Q3 2024 and includes a one-off write-down on 13.2 MEUR. The write-down is a result of impairment test during the quarter on games and includes canceled projects and underperforming launched titles. Of the 13.2 MEUR write-down amount 9 MEUR canceled titles Mudfest, Project Velos and Avatar: The Last Airbender."

As such, the game has survived less than a year since it was announced.

However, Maximum did release another fighting game recently – Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age. However, the future of that title is also under question. The game has been out for a day, and peaked at 94 concurrent players. With a total of 33 reviews as of this moment, it doesn't take an elaborate formula to figure out that the game is not selling well, and Maximum, at this point, is not known to allocate much support to such titles.

The report also mentions that Maximum Entertainment’s CEO Christina Seelye and COO Thierry Bonnefoi went into arbitration over their demand for nearly 8 million USD in relation to the earn-out payments. Another notable bullet point is that, much like the rest of the industry, Maximum Entertainment got rid of 57 employees in their pursuit of cost savings, reducing the total headcount from 238 to 181.