The studio was acquired by Meta only a year and a half ago.
According to the information Android Central, Meta has closed Ready at Dawn Studios — following the July announcement of a 20% budget cut for the Reality Labs division by 2026.
Ready at Dawn was founded in 2003 by graduates of Naughty Dog and Blizzard Entertainment. The studio released its first game together with Daxter (a PlayStation Portable add-on for the Naughty Dog platformer series), followed by three games from the God of War series (Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta, and Olympus Collection), and in 2015, the studio’s original project, the adventure action game The Order: 1886 (at the time, it became one of the most anticipated games of the year).
In 2018, Ready at Dawn turned its attention to VR and released the first two games in the Echo series, including the free-to-play virtual sports game Oculus Rift and Quest Echo Arena and the interactive sci-fi adventure game Lone Echo. Both received a response from the virtual reality fan base, leading to the release of sequels, including the arena shooter Echo Combat in 2018 and Lone Echo II in 2021.
Oculus acquired the studio in 2023 and allowed it to continue working in offices in California and Oregon. In the same year, Meta closed its free-to-play Echo VR game due to a decrease in the number of players.
It should be noted that in 2023, Meta laid off about 20,000 employees, and Mark Zuckerberg characterized it as «a year of efficiency».