On Wednesday, Android Central reported that Meta is closing Ready at Dawn, the first-party game studio behind Daxter, The Order: 1886, and the Echo VR series. The shutdown is effective immediately.
Meta has fully shut down the Ready at Dawn studio on August 7, 2024.
Meta is closing Ready at Dawn Studio, almost a year and a half after acquiring. The news came after the mid-July report that said that Meta plans to cut down on its Reality Labs division’s budget by 20 percent by 2026.
However, the Meta spokesperson said that these cuts weren’t being made to save money, but rather to “ensure that Reality Labs stays within the new budgetary constraints and that Oculus Studios can make a better long-term impact in VR development.”
In the most recent earnings, Meta said that its Reality Labs division, which looks over VR efforts, lost nearly $4.5 billion.
CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that the resources for Echo VR “could be put to other uses that I think will be useful to the now tens of millions of people who are in VR.”
Meta has commented that this move doesn’t imply wider cuts of first-party games on Quest, and the company is still dedicated to VR development.
Although Reality Labs has spent billions per quarter on development costs of XR like the Meta Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, VR games, and Meta AI features, the company plans to cut down on the spending every quarter.
As Ready at Dawn joined Oculus Studio in June 2020, just a few weeks after Echo VR was ported to the original Oculus Quest, Meta encourages Ready at Dawn employees to apply elsewhere within Oculus Studios.
The company said that it wants to retain as many employees as possible with this move.
