Latest round of Meta layoffs hits Ready at Dawn and Downpour Interactive
Meta’s latest round of layoffs has hit internal game development studios Ready at Dawn and Downpour Interactive.
Having cut 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce in late 2022, last month Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to axe a further 10,000 jobs by May.
After the latest round of cuts started on Wednesday, employees from some of the company’s VR game development studios took to social media to say they’d been laid off or that colleagues had been.
“1/3 of the studio was laid off today including the studio head,” claimed Thomas Griebel, a senior engine and graphics programmer at Lone Echo developer Ready at Dawn, which Facebook acquired in 2020.
“I just got laid off by Meta and no longer work on Onward”, former Downpour Interactive developer Michael Tsarouhas tweeted.
“Today is the toughest day in my career,” Onward producer Kasper Nahuijsen wrote, adding in a follow-up tweet: “I lost a lot of colleagues and friends today.”
Meta recently claimed to have sold almost 20 million Quest VR headsets since the platform launched in 2019.
Mark Rabkin, Meta’s vice president for VR, shared the figure with employees during a product roadmap presentation that was leaked to The Verge.
According to the presentation, Meta’s Quest 3 headset will launch this year and will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2.
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