spatialcomputing.info

Tomorrow, Meta and Ready at Dawn are shutting down Echo VR, the free-to-play game that helped pioneer VR sports. Get in now before they pull the plug.

Meta made no secret it was shutting down the zero-gravity sport Echo VR and its PC-only squad shooter variant, Echo Combat, having announced earlier this year it was sunsetting the games come August 1st at 10 AM PT (local time here). That means fans only have a few hours left to play before the multiplayer-only games are unceremoniously disconnected from Meta’s servers.

Echo VR fans didn’t go down without a fight though. Some spirited protests against the shutdown even included a dedicated fan group flying an airplane-towed message over Meta’s HQ in Menlo Park back in March, stating “ZUCK, DON’T KILL VR ESPORTS FIGHTFORECHO.COM”. Both online and offline protests fell on deaf ears though. The URL mentioned above now leads to a 404, and it’s pretty clear by now that Meta didn’t change their collective minds.

The studio recently released the Echo VR OST on YouTube, which feels like small recompense for killing consistently one of the best-rated and most popular free titles on Quest. Ready at Dawn, which was acquired by Meta in 2020, explained earlier this year the shutdown was made for “many good reasons [,] chief among them is the studio coming together to focus on our next project.”

Both Ready at Dawn and Onward studio Downpour Interactive found themselves caught up in one of the multiple rounds of layoffs to hit Meta earlier this year. To boot, Ready at Dawn has yet to reveal what’s next. Whatever it is though, we’re hoping it has many of the same hard-won learnings baked in, like Echo VR and its narrative games Lone Echo did. In the meantime, check out the OST playlist below.