Meta shrunk Ready of Dawn to death, according to co-founder
Meta's closure of Ready at Dawn was one of the low points for VR in 2024. A co-founder now gives his perspective on what happened at the VR studio.
Ready at Dawn had a studio history of more than 20 years. It developed Daxter and two God of War games for the Playstation Portable, as well as The Order: 1886 before turning its attention to virtual reality in 2015. In the following years, it developed the sci-fi epic Lone Echo and the VR sports game Echo Arena exclusively for Meta's PC VR platform.
Lone Echo was a milestone and is still considered one of the best PC VR games, while Echo Arena set new standards in multiplayer VR. Meta acquired the studio in 2020.
Almost four years later, the studio surprisingly shut down without releasing a single Quest native VR game. It was a bitter loss of talent for the VR industry.
Cost-cutting measures destroyed promising VR studio
In an interview with the YouTube channel Minnmax, studio co-founder Andrea Pessino now comments on what happened to the studio over the years at Meta.
According to Pessino, the studio experienced two waves of layoffs under Meta and shrank increasingly in the process, making it difficult to implement projects and destroying the morale of the team. The first layoffs occurred during Meta's crisis in 2022, and were followed by further cuts that were "devastating" for the studio and caused hopes of recovery to fade.
Work on Lone Echo was completed in 2021, and the studio was working on a secret major VR project, Pessino reveals.
"It was supposed to be one of the biggest and most revolutionary VR games ever (laughs). Of course, they always are. But this one was supposed to be kind of, you know, a big thing with some unique new technology, some unique new approaches. It was a great concept. It was coming along beautifully, in my opinion. Again, I don't think that had anything to do with the thing, but it was a big, expensive thing, which we couldn't have possibly finished. We were down to, like, under 70. There's no way in a million years that we can finish it that way. But we were always told, we will start to rehire and rebuild and extend the team, but we never got to that point, all we ever did was shrink until, until they shut us down."
Pessino also suggests that there were cultural issues between Ready at Dawn and Meta (then still Facebook). "You can't take a team and merge it with your culture and expect that product that effort to continue unchanged, it's just not possible," says Pessino.
"Abandoning PC VR was a huge mistake"
Looking back, Pessino says of Meta: "I'm not criticizing them. I would never be so presumptuous as to assume that you know we were in the right, and they were in the wrong. I would never assume that. From my perspective, it seems a waste more than anything else."
Pessino is still a supporter of PC VR and believes it was a mistake for Meta to discontinue the category after Lone Echo 2:
"Another thing that I felt very strongly: It was a huge mistake for Meta to abandon PC VR. Not because there's any money in it, but because it's the same reason why Porsche makes a GT3 RS, and it makes their money with the Cayenne. Because you have to have an aspirational place. You can have VR look like, you know, the cell phone equivalent of gaming. There's nothing wrong with cell phones, you know what I mean. You have to have something that people look at, even though they might not have the means to engage with it. There has to be something that sets the target. That's what PC VR gaming was. It was where you could really push the envelope and start to advance, and then you do want the mass market to trickle down, you know, that can then constantly improve and evolve and make it much more affordable and available for our people to get to. But there has to be something that drives the process of growth."
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