Ready at Dawn, developer of The Order: 1866 and Lone Echo VR games, has reportedly been shut down by parent company Meta, Android Central reports, adding that the studio s closure is part of an effort to address budget cuts to the company's Reality Labs VR division, which were reported in July.

Ready at Dawn was founded in 2003 and developed games for various PlayStation platforms before shifting to VR development with the 2017 release of "Lone Echo" for the Oculus Rift. A standalone multiplayer spin-off called "Echo VR" was later released, but despite its notable success in the VR market, the studio closed in August 2023, ostensibly to allow the studio to "focus on its next project."

But there was no next project: Ready at Dawn's most recent release was Lone Echo 2, which was released in 2021, a year after the studio was acquired by Meta.

The number of people affected by the studio closure has not been disclosed, but Meta has stated that it is not large enough to trigger California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) law, which applies to 50 or more employees; Ready at Dawn previously experienced a 2023 Meta's massive layoffs had affected the company.

Meta's Reality Labs division has been hemorrhaging money for years at a pace that in a sane world would be sustainable for about 10 minutes: it has lost nearly $50 billion in the past four years, closing one of the few game studios that seemed capable of doing anything interesting with VR. Will its fortunes turn around?I don't know how much the employees of Ready at Dawn were making, but it's probably a lot less than the nearly $9 billion Reality Labs is estimated to have lost in the first six months of 2024.

We have asked Meta for comment on this report of the closure and will update if we hear back.