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Facebook buys Ready At Dawn (Lone Echo devs)

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
More here:

https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcoming-ready-at-dawn-to-facebook/

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

16 REPLIES 16

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
- and here:

https://uploadvr.com/facebook-buys-ready-at-dawn-lone-echo/

Probably an awesome move to secure the very best VR content for Oculus (before someone else buys them, lol)

When Lone Echo 2 arrives, it may be considered made by Oculus, like Alyx was made by Valve 😉 (Valve also bought Campo Santo, the devs behind Firewatch, who helped make Alyx)

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

Interesting that this is the
third developer that Facebook has acquired from the VR community. It is as if
the original plan of creating its own studios has reverted to the use of the VR
community (the players) to vote on which developers to “consume”!


Wonder how long this will be viable, or if just acquiring a stable of the key properties
will be enough to control their ecosystem?
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
ah, you beat me to it, Rune! 🙂

This is great news indeed. Between this and owning the Beat Saber studio, Facebook and Oculus are well poised for ongoing dominance in the VR Space.

Some quotes from the articles:

On Monday, Facebook announced it has acquired developer Ready At Dawn, the studio behind The Order: 1886 and Lone Echo for Oculus. Ready At Dawn will remain an independently operated developer under the Oculus Studios team, creating “memorable, immersive, and innovative VR content.”

Ready At Dawn developed virtual reality adventure Lone Echo, a space game where players act as an AI, assisting a human captain by solving problems in VR. The studio also created Echo Arena and Echo Combat, and is currently developing Lone Echo 2. Prior to its VR work, Ready At Dawn developed God of War: Chains of Olympus, God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Daxter, and The Order: 1886 for Sony Computer Entertainment.

Ready At Dawn will retain all of its team members, and continue working out of its own studios in Irvine, California and Portland, Oregon. Through the acquisition, the studio will gain access to the same resources as Facebook and the Oculus Studios team.

Facebook isn’t ready to announce what Ready At Dawn will work on after Lone Echo 2, and mentioned in a blog post the studio has “exciting plans for future games.”

ShocksVR
Superstar
Worth mentioning that Oculus has a blog post regarding the RaD acquisition: https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcoming-ready-at-dawn-to-facebook/



i7-7700k, Zotac RTX 3080 AMP Holo (10G), QuestPro, Quest 2
Previous: Oculus GO, Oculus RIFT - 3 sensor Room-scale, Oculus Rift S

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
Lone Echo is still the best VR experience I've had to date. The level of immersion and detail are immense. The story and puzzles were extremely satisfying.

Lone Echo 2 has a lot to live up to. And with this acquisition, expectations are set for all future releases. What a fun distracting during a Pandemic!
 ❤️ 

kojack
MVP
MVP
Lone echo was great, although I do think the headlight mechanic of touching your head was a bad design choice (due to controllers hitting things and problems with extremely near tracking performance. But the way they dealt with having a body (having it drift behind you) worked well.

Hopefully Lone Echo 2 has body rotation like in the ISS VR demo (that was my main issue).

Author: Oculus Monitor,  Auto Oculus Touch,  Forum Dark Mode, Phantom Touch Remover,  X-Plane Fixer
Hardware: Threadripper 1950x, MSI Gaming Trio 2080TI, Asrock X399 Taich
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Anonymous
Not applicable
I'm just REALLY surprised that they didn't do this earlier tbh. Sony buying Insomniac (who developed a SHITLOAD of games for the Rift!) has forced their hand I think.

I would just like to point out to Mr Zuckerberg and Sony that Roughpaws Studio is open for discussions on a purchase with the bidding starting at £1bn. B)

Gunfire Games and Vertigo would also be a good shouts for a decent buyout too I reckon.

bigmike20vt
Visionary
Whilst ideally I would rather studios stay independent the last thing I want is Sony to buy them up stopping them making PCVR OR worse still someone else buying them up/or them not making enough money on VR and them going back to flat games.
It would be nice if they Embrace open XR and have other headsets officially supported other than just oculus ones however .
Personally I am fine with store exclusives but hardware exclusives within the PC space in VR is and always has been a pita for consumers . This was true in the era of 3dfx and videologic PVR and it is true today.
Can you imagine if a game only worked on AMD GPUs or Benq monitors?
Still for me overall I would say I am cautiously optimistic that at least it will mean more VR. Whether it will be gimped vr to support quest or whether their games will continue to stretch PCVR is another question.
Fiat Coupe, gone. 350Z gone. Dirty nappies, no sleep & practical transport incoming. Thank goodness for VR 🙂

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

snowdog said:

I'm just REALLY surprised that they didn't do this earlier tbh. Sony buying Insomniac (who developed a SHITLOAD of games for the Rift!) has forced their hand I think.

I would just like to point out to Mr Zuckerberg and Sony that Roughpaws Studio is open for discussions on a purchase with the bidding starting at £1bn. B)

Gunfire Games and Vertigo would also be a good shouts for a decent buyout too I reckon.


I was thinking too that Sony may have accelerated the decision to aquire RAD. The thought of Sony buying RAD could be really terrifying  :#  😄

Some have speculated that the Lone Echo 2 delay may be caused by RAD porting Lone Echo to Quest. But reading the blog I don't see any support for that idea yet. Seems like we'll get LE2 for PCVR and Quest will get an Echo Combat port, and the latter may have delayed LE2...

This may also indicate a new focus on content. Seems like anyone can make new VR HMDs these days, but making awesome content may take many generations of VR HMDs. I'm guessing that LE2 may take at least 3 years to make, and Alyx took about 4 years. Content is the hard part, not the hardware 😉 I guess Sony and MS learned that lesson a long time ago...

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"