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.

No Man’s Sky

Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky might not have started life on the best foot forward, but it has quickly grown into one of the best space exploration games on the market over the course of many significant updates. No Man’s Sky features a huge open world filled with all sorts of planets to discover and things to do, and the VR edition adds another layer of immersion to it all – making it the definitive way to experience what it has to offer.

Spotted by YouTuber QuestWithMatt on Twitter, Batman: Arkham Shadow’s first Achievement – titled “False God” – has been unlocked by over 1 million players. The Achievement is unlocked within the opening minutes, so that number is a fairly accurate estimation of the game’s total player count.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that Arkham Shadow is free with every Meta Quest 3S and Meta Quest 3 sold since its release, which means we don’t know what its actual sales numbers are.

As for those hoping for a new AAA console Batman title, last year, reports claimed that a new Batman game had entered development at Rocksteady Studios following the failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Read more on that through here.

Little update. https://t.co/RJI0TY0oyW pic.twitter.com/yp4yTwGLPm

— QuestWithMatt (@QuestWithMatt) February 2, 2025

Please note there are major spoilers ahead!

Black Myth Wukong

Developer Game Science produced a great action adventure in the form of Black Myth Wukong, taking the known narrative elements of the classic novel Journey to the West and crafting a thrilling sequence of memorable boss fights one after another. While the narrative beats follow a more traditional approach to storytelling, Black Myth delivers a fitting finale to the entire ordeal with a showdown against the Stone Monkey which is followed by a long sequence that puts an end to the tale of Wukong and his search for the Six Senses. Of course, there are multiple endings involved – but each of them is equally emotional in its own right.

Developed by Camouflaj, Arkham Shadow is a sequel to Batman: Arkham Origins but takes place before Arkham Asylum. It sees players on a mission to defeat the Rat King and focuses more on linear indoor levels. Unlike previous titles, the experience is entirely in first-person.

Nevertheless, it retains all the core gameplay tenets from free-flow combat and Detective Vision to utilizing tools to outwit and take down enemies. One nice touch is that peeking around corners is more natural since the player can see things from Batman’s perspective. Though the Rat King is seemingly the main antagonist, Two-Face, Scarecrow, and other villains also appear.

Head here for more detailed gameplay of Batman: Arkham Shadow. As for Rocksteady Studios, it’s rumored to be working on a new title in the series following the underwhelming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

As you’d expect, Batman: Arkham Shadow will be played from a first-person perspective, and as Batman takes on the Rat King, players will find themselves in plenty of familiar combat and stealth gameplay. The trailer offers a solid look at how the series’ familiar mechanics are being translated to VR, while also showcasing glimpses of various gadgets, detective vision, bosses, characters (many of whom fans will be very familiar with), and more. Check out the trailer below.

Meanwhile, a narrower release window has also been confirmed for the title, which was previously announced as fall 2024. Batman: Arkham Shadow will release exclusively for Meta Quest 3 sometime in October. 

The First Descendant

NEXON Games’ The First Descendant is an upcoming looter shooter where players assume the role of Descendants who are the last line of defense for humanity in the war against alien invaders. Each Descendant has different active and passive abilities, and you can use a bunch of items and weapons to customize your character with whatever feels best suited for your purposes. The First Descendant comes out for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on July 2nd.

Batman: Arkham Shadow will see the Batman going up against the Rat King, as the villain and his followers pose a new threat to Gotham City. The trailer sets up said conflict, while also offering glimpses of some other key characters (such as Commissioner Gordon).

Described as an “immersive, full-length entry in the Arkham franchise”, the game will also feature appearances from other iconic characters such as Harley Quinn, Scarecrow, and more. It’s set two years after the events of Arkham Origins, which means it serves as another prequel to the mainline Arkham trilogy. Gameplay footage has yet to be unveiled.

Batman: Arkham Shadow launches exclusively for Meta Quest 3 this Fall. Stay tuned for more details on the game in the coming weeks and months.

Recently, however, a new Arkham game was announced at long last- though this right here is a classic “not like this” situation. In collaboration with WB Games, Oculus Studios recently announced Batman: Arkham Shadow, a virtual reality spinoff being developed by Camouflaj exclusive for Meta Quest 3. On paper, of course, it’s a brand new game in the Batman: Arkham series, but analyzing the situation within its wider context for even a second shows just how tone deaf WB Games has become, and how poorly it continues to manage one of its biggest IP.

I should begin this with the disclaimer that this isn’t a rant against the game itself. Batman: Arkham Shadow may very well turn out to be a legitimately enjoyable experience. Oculus Studios has done an excellent job of supporting the Quest headsets with some really good games, and Camouflaj is obviously a talented studio, something that it proved beyond doubt with the genuinely solid Marvel’s Iron Man VR. There’s every chance that Arkham Shadow turns out to be a good game- but even if that does happen, it will remain representative of WB Games’ most frustrating tendencies as a publisher and IP owner.

The plain and simple fact that there has been no true follow-up to Batman: Arkham Knight even now, nearly a decade on from its launch, has been a constant source of frustration for fans as it is. The two studios that worked on the franchise – Rocksteady Studios and WB Games Montreal – were both taken off Arkham and put to work on other superhero games that were tangentially related to Batman, but were really just doing their own thing. The big problem, of course, is that the things that Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were doing were underwhelming at best and downright atrocious at worst, and in the aftermath of both launches, the vast majority of the people who played the games were left wondering why the studio behind them didn’t just make a new Arkham game instead.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in particular was especially grating. Taking talented single player studios and turning them into underprepared live service factories has been a rampant epidemic in the games industry, and Rocksteady predictably fell victim to that trap as well. But not only did Suicide Squad’s shocking lack of quality further cement the notion that Rocksteady and WB Games would both have been far better served if the former had just made a new single player Batman game, the fact that it was set in the Arkham universe and proved to be such a disappointing (and at times downright destructive) return to it was also salt in the wounds for fans of the Arkham games.

Amidst the growing restlessness of the Arham fanbase and the recent disappointment of Suicide Squad, the announcement of Batman: Arkham Shadow comes across as massively tone deaf. It is certainly worth noting that the game is being published by Oculus Studios, and developed in-house by Meta-owned Camouflaj, which means WB Games is presumably going to have minimal involvement with the project. But seeing the company license out the IP for a VR exclusive spinoff while refusing to greenlight the next big single player instalment that series fans have been waiting for for decades is exasperating move- and, unfortunately enough, completely on brand for what WB Games has turned into of late.

Because, once again, many of the biggest issues that so many have with WB Games in recent years can be traced back to the company’s insistence on going all in on the live service fad. On no few occasions, the company has made it clear that it intends to expand its profits going forward by prioritizing recurring user spending in live service experiences, which is a strange decision to take at this point, when the games industry as a whole has seen a startling number of high profile live service failures, and major players seem to be more reluctant to try and get a slice of that pie. One would assume that the complete critical and commercial failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League would have set WB Games straight, but no- the company has only doubled down on its live service stance since then. Though the upcoming Wonder Woman title is apparently not going to be live service, it’s more than likely that the majority of other future WB titles will be.

The roaring success of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games has shown in no vague terms that there’s incredible demand for well-made AAA single player superhero games (to say nothing of the critical and commercial success that WB itself enjoyed with the Arkham trilogy), and there’s plenty of other major players in the industry who have been alerted to that demand and are set to come out with their own AAA superhero games in the coming years. But WB Games has decided in all of its wisdom that wasting massive properties like Batman in favour of live service games (that, judging by Suicide Squad, aren’t going to be great) is where the true gold lies. Never mind the fact that 2023’s highest selling game worldwide was WB Games’ own Hogwarts Legacy, an entirely single player game with no live service elements and no microtransactions.

So are we going to see a new single player AAA Batman game anytime soon? Sadly, all signs right now point to no. Warner Bros. seems all set on chasing the dream of endless live service money, in spite of the fact that its very first attempt to do so has fallen completely flat, while ignoring the deafeningly loud demand for a new Arkham sequel, or something that at least provides a similar experience. From the lack of a new instalment, to the disappointment of what Arkham’s makers have delivered instead, to the company’s larger frustrating business decisions, restlessness in the Arkham fanbase has been high, which is why it feels like the announcement of Batman: Arkham Shadow has come at the worst possible time.

That’s probably unfair to the team making it- in fact, it definitely is. The last time that Camouflaj made a virtual reality superhero game was Marvel’s Iron Man VR, and as those who’ve played it will tell you, it was a legitimately good game- which means there’s every chance that Arkham Shadow, too, turns out to be another impressive notch on the belt for the studio. For now, however, more than anything else, it serves as a reminder for how spectacularly Warner Bros. has mismanaged one of its biggest and most successful gaming IP. It’s a shocking display of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. WB Games has not only shot itself in the foot, it’s fed the decapitated foot into a meat grinder and then tossed the meat into a lake where it’s been digested and pooped out by gators.

Just make a new Arkham game, man.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Oculus Studios has announced Batman: Arkham Shadow in partnership with WB Games. A new instalment in the acclaimed Rocksteady Studios-developed franchise, Arkham Shadow has been announced exclusively for Meta Quest 3. A brief announcement trailer suggests that Batman will be going up against the Ratcatcher this time, with the Caped Crusader shown to be squaring off against a horde of rats. Check it out below.

Other details on the game – such as when exactly in the Arkham timeline it will be placed, or what we can expect from its combat, stealth, world design, and the like – are currently scant. It has been confirmed, however, that a full reveal for the game will be coming at Summer Game Fest 2024 on June 7.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is being developed by Camouflaj, the studio behind 2020’s Marvel’s Iron Man VR. Camouflaj was acquired by Meta back in 2022, and around the same time, reports claimed that the studio was working on a VR Batman title.