Meta closes Ready At Dawn, the studio behind Echo VR

Aug 09, 2024 02:16 AM - 3 months ago 87824

Meta is closing Ready At Dawn, its first-party workplace down VR games for illustration Echo VR and Lone Echo, Android Central reported connected Wednesday. The shutdown is effective immediately. Meta acquired nan workplace in 2020.

As for why Meta is shutting down nan studio, here’s what Android Central said:

One report in mid-July said that Meta was cutting its Reality Labs division’s fund by 20% by 2026, and an soul memo sent to Meta labor by Gio Hunt, VP Oculus Studios — seen by Android Central — supports this reasoning. A Meta spokesperson told Android Central that nan cuts weren’t being made to “save money,” per se. Rather, these cuts are being made to guarantee that Reality Labs stays wrong nan caller budgetary constraints and that Oculus Studios tin make a “better semipermanent impact” successful VR development.

We tried to inquire for much details, but Meta spokesperson Alaina Laszewski declined to comment. In its astir caller earnings, Meta said that its Reality Labs division, which its VR efforts autumn under, lost astir $4.5 billion.

When Meta announced that it had acquired Ready At Dawn, it said that the workplace would “continue creating memorable, immersive, and innovative VR contented for gamers astir nan world arsenic an independently-operated studio.” And while it did spell connected to merchandise Lone Echo II for nan Rift and Rift S — nan crippled isn’t natively disposable for Meta’s standalone Quest headsets — Meta unopen down nan well-loved Echo VR in August 2023.

At nan time, CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that nan resources to make Echo VR “could beryllium put to different uses that I deliberation will beryllium useful to nan now tens of millions of group who are successful VR.” The Ready At Dawn squad besides said that it was working connected its adjacent project, but now it seems that task won’t beryllium released.