CEO Pim Holfve of Avalanche Studios says that partnering with Xbox and putting Contraband on the Xbox Game Pass made sense due to the “grandness of the project.”

Announced at this year's E3, Contraband is an open-world co-op game by Avalanche Studios. The company is known for games like the critically-acclaimed Just Cause series and the highly underrated Mad Max.

The CEO spoke to Gamesinudstry.biz about the partnership and discussed the approach to working with Microsoft.

“We've had a great relationship with Microsoft, and working with a first-party has been intriguing as well,” says Holfve. “It's a new type of partnership for us. We've had fantastic partnerships with Square Enix, Bethesda, and Warner Bros, but those are not the same as first-party.”

Microsoft wasn't the only first-party Avalanche could have teamed up with, but Holfve says it “made a lot of sense to work with Xbox on this because of the grandness of [the project],” and that  “It's not a concept we would pitch to every publisher.”

Holfve also mentioned Avalanche Studios' 2017 game TheHunter: Call of the Wild as an example of how Game Pass helped them to find success.

TheHunter: Call of the Wild helped us prove our service model and Xbox Game Pass was fantastic because we were able to reach so many more players,” Holfve says.

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It seems as though Avalanche is more than happy with the route they went with. And although there is no release date for Contraband yet, fans of the open-world game genre should surely keep an eye on this one.