nDreams, one of the vital veteran VR studios, as we speak introduced it’s tightening the belt with a layoff spherical attributable to have an effect on 17.5% of the corporate.
The Farnborough, UK-based studio maintains within the LinkenIn announcement that layoffs are in response to “a difficult VR video games market, located inside a tricky gaming panorama extra broadly.”
The studio additional notes the restructure “will allow us to raised serve present and future audiences in creating medium-defining titles for years to come back.”
Based in 2013, nDreams has expanded its function past sport developer, changing into a writer and opening plenty of first-party VR studios, together with nDreams Studio Orbital, nDreams Studio Elevation, and Nearlight, the latter of which was acquired by nDreams in late 2022.
In 2023, Stockholm, Sweden-based gaming group Aonic acquired nDreams for $110 million. On the time, the studio mentioned it employed 250 folks, which means the layoff might have an effect on as much as 40 folks.
Notably, nDreams is understood for a bunch of VR video games over time, together with The Meeting (2016), Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), Fracked (2021), and Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord (2023), and extra.
The studio notes upcoming titles Frenzies and Vendetta Eternally will probably be unaffected by the restructuring.
Whereas disheartening, the information of layoffs comes as no actual shock given turmoil within the wider gaming market. Layoffs spanning 2023 and 2024 included plenty of high publishers and studios, similar to Embracer Group, Unity, Microsoft, EA, Sony, Epic Video games, Take-Two Interactive and Riot Video games.
Particularly, VR studio closures affected Meta’s Prepared at Daybreak (Lone Echo, Echo VR), Sony’s London Studio (PlayStation Worlds, Blood & Reality (2019), and indie developer Archiact (Doom 3 VR Version).