Ready At Dawn Was Working On A "Revolutionary" VR Game When Meta Shut It Down

Ready At Dawn was working on one of the "most revolutionary VR games ever" when Meta shut it, the studio's co-founder claims.

Seven months after the shutdown, Ready At Dawn co-founder Andrea Pessino gave a two hour interview with MinnMax about the studio's history, including its time under Meta.

According to Pessino, the Facebook-owned Oculus originally "saved" Ready At Dawn by contracting the studio to build the original Lone Echo, and was "amazing" to work with.

"We would have been gone in 2016, 2015 really. I'm on record calling them the dream publisher during that time. When we were working on Lone Echo, they were amazing. They were the best we ever worked with", Pessino told MinnMax.

Facebook Buys Lone Echo Developer Ready At Dawn

Ready At Dawn Studios is the latest VR developer to be acquired by Oculus maker Facebook. The social networking giant purchased the California-based studio for an undisclosed amount. Ready at Dawn will join Facebook’s roster of first-party game development studios working on VR titles under the Oculus Studios banner.

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Pessino was originally optimistic about the acquisition too, believing it would give the studio the resources to "push the envelope".

"I was on record being super optimistic about the acquisition", Pessino said. "I thought we finally would have had the resources we needed to really push the envelope."

"But as it happens with very large corporations, it's shifting balance."

"I think Meta is an incredible company. For creative development though, it's a very challenging environment. And the mood changed internally because of the challenges they were facing back in 2022."

"You can't take a team and merge it with your culture and expect that effort to continue unchanged."

According to Pessino, Ready At Dawn saw two rounds of layoffs. Its first round, in 2022, went unreported. "With the first round of layoffs, I knew that our days were numbered", he told MinnMax.

"I didn't think it was going to end this quickly, I'll be honest, but I knew there was no coming back", he said, "And people were cut from our team that made no sense whatsoever."

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Meta laid off “many” employees at Echo VR’s developer Ready at Dawn and Onward’s developer Downpour Interactive.

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Pessino describes the second round of layoffs, affecting around a third of the studio in 2023, as "just devastating".

"We got gutted."

At the time, Ready At Dawn was working on its next VR game. But with a shrinking team and ambitious goals, it turned into a death spiral, despite the studio's hopes.

"In spite of all of this, it was starting to get exciting again. People were starting to believe that, okay, maybe we can rebuild."

"It was something that was supposed to be one of the biggest and most revolutionary VR games ever. Of course they always are. But this one was supposed to be a big thing with some unique new technology, some unique new approaches. And it was a great concept.

It was coming along beautifully in my opinion. But it was a big, expensive thing, which we couldn't have possibly finished when we were down to like under 70. You know, there's no way in a million years that we could 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 they shut us down."

The Public History Of Ready At Dawn

Ready At Dawn was founded in 2003, and from 2006 to 2015 mostly released Sony-funded games on PlayStation consoles, including both PSP God Of War spinoffs and the PS4 game The Order: 1886.

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From 2015, Ready At Dawn started taking Facebook funding to develop AAA titles for the Oculus Rift, starting with 2017's Lone Echo. This release also included Echo Arena, a standalone multiplayer mode, which became an esport and was later ported to Quest and renamed Echo VR, before being shut down by Meta in 2023.

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In 2020 Facebook acquired Ready At Dawn, and in 2021 the studio released Lone Echo 2, the last Oculus Rift blockbuster exclusive, which we called a "swansong" for the headset in our review.

From there, all eyes in the VR gaming community were on what Ready At Dawn would do next. Would we see Lone Echo ported to Quest, a Lone Echo 3, or an entirely new franchise?

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In fact, in the original announcement of Echo VR's shutdown, the bad news was dampened by the claim that the decision was taken so that the team could put "all hands on deck" for its next game. But it never arrived.

The first sign of trouble came three months later, when Meta laid off around a third of the studio as part of wider layoffs across the company in its "year of efficiency". Then, last year, Meta shut down Ready At Dawn and laid off all the remaining staff.