Avatar: The Last Airbender's planned AAA RPG may not be as dead as it looked last week, but it also does not sound like the same project fans were first promised.
Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko pushed back on the idea that the game was fully canceled, saying in an Instagram post quoted by Polygon that the project had instead suffered a major setback. His comments arrive after IGN reported that the Saber Interactive version of the game was no longer in production under Paramount's post-merger games group.
"Despite what anyone without actual knowledge may be chirping about, that big video game—the premise of which I came up with—wasn’t 'canceled.'" Konietzko said. "Did it experience a big setback? Yep. These things are not easy (none of this is). Will it ever happen? Hopefully."
That is not the same as a fresh announcement, release window or studio reveal. The useful update is narrower: one of Avatar's creators is saying the idea behind the big-budget game is still alive in some form, even if the original path appears to have been disrupted.
The Avatar RPG still sounds like a reset, not a revival
The RPG was announced in 2024 as a Paramount Game Studios and Saber Interactive action RPG for PC and consoles. At the time, it was described as the biggest game in the franchise's history, with plans for players to control a new Avatar thousands of years before Aang and Korra.
The project looked finished after Shawn Kittelsen, Paramount Games Studio's head of creative and production, told IGN that the game was not in production when the current Paramount Games setup formed after the Paramount Skydance merger. Kittelsen also said a AAA Avatar game could still happen "in a different iteration," language that now lines up more closely with Konietzko's reset framing than with a clean cancellation.
That distinction matters for fans who were hoping for a full-scale Avatar RPG, not just another licensed side project. The original pitch promised a new era of the Avatar world, elemental mastery and companion-driven combat. None of those details have been reconfirmed for whatever the project may become.
Paramount has already been reshaping its games strategy around major brands including TMNT, SpongeBob, Star Trek and Avatar. As we covered in Paramount's wider games push, the company has been positioning games as a larger business unit after the Skydance merger, not just a licensing add-on.
Konietzko also pointed fans toward San Diego Comic-Con, which runs July 23 to July 26, saying more official Avatar news is coming there. Until then, the practical state of the RPG is still uncertain: the Saber version is not clearly moving forward, but the concept may not have been abandoned either.