Shortly after Meta shut down three of its VR game development studios, another one of its studios, Camouflaj, has been hit with lay-offs. According to Aftermath, the studio behind Batman: Arkham Shadow has lost several of its employees as part of the “heavy lay-offs”. As a result, projects that were in-development at the studio have also been cancelled.
While Meta hasn’t offered a statement on the lay-offs, it confirmed to Kotaku that the studio hasn’t been shut down like Armature Studios, Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru Games, despite its team having been essentially gutted.
Citing anonymous former Meta employees, the report states that Camouflaj has essentially been gutted, with “just a handful of employees” remaining at the studio. The team has been described as working on “the new user experience for upcoming hardware.” The lay-offs have also included heads of the studio, including founder Ryan Payton.
Camouflaj was founded all the way back in 2011, and made a name for itself thanks to its stealth-based action adventure game République. After having brought the game to a variety of platforms from mobile to consoles, the studio would then sign a deal with Marvel Games to work on Iron Man VR, which came out in 2020 on PS4’s PlayStationVR, and Meta’s Quest 2 headsets and above.
Former senior animator at the studio Kaitlin S. took to LinkedIn to talk about being laid off. “I was a part of the recent Meta lay-offs that hit Camouflaj,” wrote Kaitlin. “It’s been an incredible 12+ years with the team, and I am so proud of what we accomplished in that time! I will miss the Camouflaj team a great deal. It was an incredible group of game devs.”
The last major release by Camouflaj was Batman: Arkham Shadow, which was released in 2024 exclusively for the Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets. The title is a first-person action adventure game that pits players, in the role of Batman, against the Rat King. It features combat systems based on the Batman: Arkham series, and brings in other elements from Rocksteady’s franchise as well, including Detective Vision and stealth sections. Gadgets like batarangs, the grapple gun and smoke bombs also make a comeback.
Camouflaj is one of several studios to have fallen victim to Meta’s decision to shift its investments over from its development on the “Metaverse” to wearable technology. Due to this, around 10,000 workers at Meta have been laid off, the company’s Reality Labs division also being hit quite heavily. “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year,” said a spokesperson for the company.
While Camouflaj remains open to function in some capacity, Sanzaru Games, Armature Studio, and Twisted Pixel have been officially shut down. These studios had worked on a number of major projects for Meta’s Quest headsets, including the Asgard’s Wrath series, the VR port of the classic Resident Evil 4, and Marvel’s Deadpool VR. The three studios had a history of working on a number of smaller projects before they started making VR games, with Armature Studios and Sanzaru Games even having worked with Sony on bringing over some of its older titles to at-the-time modern platforms like the PS3 and PS Vita.
