Meta has shut down Ready at Dawn Studios, the game studio behind the Meta Quest Echo VR series
Android Central reported on Meta’s decision to shut down Ready at Dawn Studios about a year and a half after buying the game studio, and the news comes on the heels of a report in mid-July that Meta was planning to cut its Reality Labs division’s budget by 20% by 2026, when Meta is set to release the upcoming Meta Quest 4 and Quest 4s VR headsets
Ready at Dawn has been in the gaming industry since the days of Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), and the studio released its first game in 2006 with Daxter, a PSP spinoff of the popular Jak and Daxter series
Ready at Dawn also released three titles in Sony's God of War series for the PSP, including Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta, and the Olympus Collection, which collected two of its previous titles, and the studio moved to consoles starting with the PlayStation 4 in 2015 with The Order: 1886
The Victorian-era third-person action adventure became one of the most anticipated games of the year due to its boundary-pushing graphics, and after a wave of mixed reviews, Ready at Dawn tried to get a more lighthearted multiplayer game in 2017 called De-Formers for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with Engadget senior editor Jessica Condit describing the colorful characters' combat competition as "cannibalistic 3D cartoon fighting
The rise of virtual reality and its ease of accessibility led the studio to focus again in 2018 on the new immersive gaming medium, and the studio released the first two VR titles in its Echo series, including the free-to-play Oculus Rift and Quest virtual sports game Echo Arena and the zero-gravity interactive sci-fi adventure Lone Echo.
Both found a fan base on the all-in-one VR headset, leading to sequels including the free-to-play arena shooter Echo Combat in 2018 and Lone Echo II in 2021
Oculus bought the studio in 2023 and allowed it to continue operations in its California and Oregon offices, the same year Meta shut down its free-to-play Echo VR game due to dwindling player numbers
Meta has cut more than 20,000 jobs since 2023, a period that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as a “year of efficiency