Meta’s first-party VR studio Ready at Dawn—the developers of Lone Echo and more—is reportedly being shuttered. This comes after the studio was acquired back in 2020 and has only released one game since.
Ready at Dawn is the studio behind one of PC VR’s most immersive games: Lone Echo (2017), and its popular multiplayer spinoff, Echo VR. Following the release of those two titles, the studio was eventually acquired by Meta in 2020, and then finally launched Lone Echo II on PC in late 2021.
Ready at Dawn was well into the development of Lone Echo II when the studio was acquired by Meta. The impetus for the acquisition remains unclear to this day, but two major possibilities are: Ready at Dawn was struggling to find enough money to make it over the finish line on Lone Echo II and Meta stepped in to make sure it would happen, or things were going just swell for the studio but Meta made a seriously attractive offer the studio couldn’t refuse.
Whatever the case, Lone Echo II was the only major title released by Ready at Dawn following the Meta acquisition. Nearly three years after its late 2021 release, the studio hasn’t released any new game, let alone announced one.
In fact, the only major thing that’s happened outwardly with the studio is that it shut down Echo VR, a beloved multiplayer spin-off of the Lone Echo games, in 2022.
With little to show, many were left wondering what the studio was up to.
A port of Lone Echo and Lone Echo II for Quest was considered a possibility, but Meta quashed that hope in 2022 when it said there were no plans for Lone Echo on Quest, and instead said the studio was “in the early stages of working on new, exciting projects and can’t wait to share more information about them in the future.” Perhaps a brand new Quest game was in the works?
Whatever the studio was working on, it was unfortunately all for naught. Android Central reported today that Ready at Dawn is being closed down, effective immediately.
This is not only an unexpected shock for those outside of the studio, but seemingly for those within as well; Android Central says that Meta employees were “encouraged to apply elsewhere within Oculus Studios and that the company wants to retain as many talented developers as possible”—suggesting that little effort was made to absorb the studio’s talent into the company at large ahead of time.
The closure of the studio comes amid Meta’s efforts to curb spending in Reality Labs, its metaverse and XR division. The division has spent an average of $15.5 billion annually since its inception, with average annual revenue of only $2.1 billion.
The shuttering of Ready at Dawn closes a nearly 21 year chapter for the studio which got its start building titles for PSP, PS3, and PS4. Before its acquisition by Meta, the studio had pivoted to VR development and created Lone Echo, which became an iconic PC VR title thanks to its production quality, innovative zero-G locomotion, and the Echo VR multiplayer spin-off which took on a life of its own.