What you need to know
Ready at Dawn Studios, part of Oculus Studios, is closing effective immediately. The studio has produced some of the highest-rated VR games of all time, including Lone Echo, Lone Echo 2 and Echo VR, as well as PSP classics like God of War and Daxter. According to Meta, Ready at Dawn employees are being encouraged to apply for positions at other studios under the Oculus Studios umbrella. The cuts were made to meet Reality Labs’ new budget caps, rather than as an aggressive cost-cutting measure.
One of VR’s greatest development studios is closing permanently today (August 7). Ready at Dawn Studios is the developer behind the well-known Echo VR and Lone Echo games, which received critical and customer acclaim. However, the studio hasn’t released a new game since Echo VR was ported to Quest in May 2020. Sales of Lone Echo 2, a PCVR exclusive game, may have influenced the decision.
Meta first made studio cuts in February of last year, when it announced it was shutting down Echo VR, even though the player count was still “just under 10,000,” as Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth put it at the time. It’s worth noting that in the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call last week, Meta said that Quest 3 sales were “exceeding expectations.”
A report in mid-July said Meta plans to cut the budget of its Reality Labs division by 20% by 2026, and an official Meta blog post backed up the reasoning. A Meta spokesperson told Android Central that the cuts are not strictly for “cost-cutting” reasons. Rather, these cuts are being made to help Reality Labs stay within new budget constraints and allow Oculus Studios to have a “significant long-term impact” on VR development.
Meta also commented that this isn’t a sign of a major cut in the number of first-party games for Quest, and that the company remains focused on VR development.
Reality Labs has historically spent billions of dollars per quarter on development costs for its XR hardware, including the Meta Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, VR games and Meta AI features, but the company has begun to impose strict caps on its spending each quarter.
Ready at Dawn has been part of Oculus Studios since June 2020, just a few weeks after Echo VR was ported to the original Oculus Quest. Meta said that Ready at Dawn employees are encouraged to apply for other positions within Oculus Studios, and the company wants to secure as many talented developers as possible.
Meta also explained that although the move will result in the entire studio being shut down, it will not trigger California’s WARN Act, which requires companies to give employees advance notice before laying off 50 or more employees within a 30-day period, and that all employees will receive severance pay similar to previous terminations by Meta.
Meta was asked by other Oculus Studios developers about the possibility of a Quest port of Lone Echo or Lone Echo 2, but did not comment.
