In a second major acquisition, Facebook reveals that they have acquired Ready At Dawn Studios, creators of Lone Echo and The Order: 1886.
Today has been a busy day for Mark Zuckerberg; Following the announcement that the Microsoft Mixer would be closed on a migration to Facebook Gaming, the embattled tech company announced another major acquisition. Starting today, developers Ready at Dawn – creators of The order: 1886, Daxterand the handheld God of War titles: will now be owned by Facebook.
Revealed in a blog post just moments ago, Facebook revealed that Ready at Dawn would be transitioning to the broader Facebook team. The move isn’t entirely a surprise: For the past three years, Ready At Dawn has focused solely on a collection of games for the Oculus Rift, including Lonely echo, Echo Arena, Echo Combat and next Lone Echo II (seen in trailer below):
To some extent, the eventual acquisition should have been seen as inevitable with Ready At Dawn’s track record and Facebook’s recent series of acquisitions.
On the other hand, many legacy PlayStation players have enjoyed a wealth of Sony-exclusive content from Ready at Dawn. PlayStation had previously relied on the studio with some of its most iconic properties, such as Jak and Daxter and God of War. More recently, Ready At Dawn created a technical marvel with The order: 1886, a game that will end tragically in a cliffhanger that probably won’t close.
According to the blog post that introduced this move, the Ready at Dawn acquisition played into multiple factors, not just the games and the broader goodwill they have. The blog post directly mentions the ‘studio zero-g continuous locomotion system and full-body IK (inverse kinematics)’. While those words probably mean more than buzzwords, the bottom line is that Oculus probably hopes to acquire some proprietary VR systems and technology.
The blog post offers some other interesting insights, notably that the entire team is moving to Facebook (rather than a smaller project division), that there are likely to be other acquisitions on the way “for years to come,” and the main focus of the team stay Lone Echo II until new notice.
In any case, Lone Echo II It was delayed due to the global pandemic, though it still points to a 2020 release date, exclusively on Oculus.
