Meta Shuts Down First-Party Quest Studio Ready at Dawn Over Budget Issues

Meta reportedly shut down Ready at Dawn, a first-party Quest studio, which was responsible for games like Daxter and the Echo VR series, over budget issues.

The decision to close down the studio was allegedly made in order to keep Reality Labs, which is similarly struggling, within new budget restraints. A representative for Meta said that the cuts do not herald a larger culling for its first-party studios.

Meta Shuts Down Ready at Dawn

Ready at Dawn was established in 2003 by Naughty Dog and Blizzard Entertainment veterans Ru Weerasuriya, Andrea Pessino, and Didier Malenfant. Daxter was the studio's debut title and it was a PlayStation Portable spinoff of Naughty Dog's platformer franchise.

During the studio's early stages, it created PlayStation Portable spinoffs for Sony Santa Monica's God of War franchise as well as the Nintendo Wii port for Okami. It launched its own original project in 2015, which was PlayStation 4's The Order: 1886, according to GameDeveloper.

After Ready at Dawn released Deformers, a console multiplayer brawler, in 2017, it shifted its focus to VR. In that same year, it simultaneously released the adventure games Echo Arena and Lone Echo for the Meta Quest and Oculus Rift devices.

In 2020, Oculus Studios acquired Ready at Dawn and the latter then made Echo Combat and Lone Echo II. The latter and fellow developer Downpour Interactive cut staff as part of a larger Meta restructuring last year.

The announcement of Ready at Dawn's closure comes on the heels of a mid-July report that Meta is planning to cut its Reality Labs division's budget by 20% by 2026. That is the time when it is set to release the Meta Quest 4 and Quest 4s, which are the company's next VR headsets, said Engadget.

Influence on the Video Games Industry

In its early years, Ready at Dawn was also responsible for three games in the God of War franchise by Sony. These include Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta, and the Olympus Collection.

The studio's closure also comes as Meta has cut more than 20,000 jobs since last year, which is a period that CEO Mark Zuckerberg characterized as a "year of efficiency." Now, Meta is encouraging employees of Ready at Dawn to apply to other studios within the Oculus Studios umbrella.

The company first made cuts to the studio in February this year after announcing that it would shutter Echo VR. The decision was made despite still having a player count "in the low 10 thousands," according to AndroidCentral.