Ready at Dawn announced on January 31st that their competitive VR frisbee-combat game, Echo VR, will be shutting down on August 1st. Add-on and in-game purchases were disabled alongside the announcement which follows below:
At Ready At Dawn, we pride ourselves on being open and communicative with our community. To that end, we have news to share… after many discussions internally and with our partners at Meta, we have made the difficult decision to shut down Echo VR.
What does this mean for Echo VR? Well… we’re not shutting it down tomorrow. Echo VR will continue running until August 1, 2023–10:00 AM Pacific, at which point servers and services will be shut down preventing any further play.
By no means was this decision made lightly. But it was made for many good reasons and chief among them is the studio coming together to focus on our next project. We can’t say anything about it yet, but we are all excited and need all hands on deck.
The entire Ready At Dawn team is grateful to each of you for your help in taking Echo Arena from a small passion project to one of the top VR games on the Oculus Store over the last five years. We’ve been absolutely floored to see the community that has grown around Echo and grateful to all the passionate people we’ve been able to meet online, in the arena, and at events. From our humble beginnings with the ESL’s first few tournaments, to the VRML’s multiple massive seasons and other fun leagues, many fond memories have been made over the years. Remember throwing snowballs with Sakurabot? How about finding the theremin in the customization room? And no one forgets their first full-court goal!
We hope to see you all in our next project and can’t wait to share it with you in the future.
Echo VR Announcement – January 31st, 2023
The rest of the post details items and rewards that will be unlocked for players as a “giveback event” running now until August 1st. A short FAQ section goes on to confirm that no refunds for any purchases will be refunded, quite a surprising difference compared to most games with virtual currencies and in-game shops.
As a free-to-play title Echo VR will remain available on the Oculus store for anyone to jump into until August 1st. Thanks to HandMaskTar for submitting the news, I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and we’ll have a page up on the site later.