Ready at Dawn, the developer of The Order: 1866 and the Lone Echo VR games, has reportedly been closed by parent company Meta. An Android Central report says the studio’s closure comes as part of an effort to meet budget reductions, reported in July, at the company’s Reality Labs VR division.
Ready at Dawn was founded in 2003 and developed games for various PlayStation platforms until shifting focus to VR development with the 2017 release of Lone Echo for the Oculus Rift. A standalone multiplayer spinoff called Echo VR followed, but despite being a notable success in the VR market it was closed in August 2023, ostensibly so the studio could “focus on our next project.”
But there was no next project: Ready at Dawn’s most recent release was Lone Echo 2, which came out in 2021, the year after the studio was acquired by Meta.
The number of people affected by the studio closure hasn’t been revealed, but Meta reportedly said the number isn’t high enough to trigger California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which applies to workforces of 50 or more employees. Ready at Dawn had previously been impacted by deep layoffs at Meta that occurred in 2023.
Meta’s Reality Labs division has for years been bleeding money at a rate that would be sustainable for about 10 minutes in any kind of sane world: Nearly $50 billion lost over the past four years. Will shuttering one of the few game studios that seemed able to do something interesting with VR turn those fortunes around? I’m going to say probably not: I don’t know how much Ready at Dawn employees were making but I’d guess it was a pretty small slice of the nearly $9 billion Reality Labs is estimated to have lost over the first six months of 2024.
I’ve reached out to Meta for comment on the reported closure and will update if I receive a reply.
