Survios, one of VR’s most senior game studios and developer behind Alien: Rogue Incursion (2024), is reportedly shutting down, as a majority of staff have been laid off.
While Survios hasn’t publicly announced the shutdown at the time of this writing, the reduction in headcount appears to be drastic enough to all but confirm that the VR veteran studio is closing up shop.
Dylan Ralston, previously a Combat Designer at Survios, says in a LinkedIn post on Saturday the studio is “essentially shuttered, with all of the team members responsible for development being let go, including myself.”
Tim Schumann, Senior Technical Sound Designer at Survios, also maintains the studio is shutting down.
Survios released over a dozen games since its founding in 2013, which started with breakout co-cop combat game Raw Data (2016), notably one of the first VR games to pass $1 million in revenue.
As a pioneer of the space, Survios explored a variety of genres, some of which were based on its own IP, including foot racing game Sprint Vector (2018), immersive song-making game Electronauts (2018), and ship-based battle arena Battlewake (2019).
The studio also released a number of VR games based on popular franchises and IPs, including boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory (2018), narrative-driven adventure Westworld Awakening (2019), zombie shooter The Walking Dead: Onslaught (2020), puzzle game Puzzle Bobble VR: Vacation Odyssey (2021), an upgraded re-release with Creed: Rise to Glory – Championship Edition (2023), and Alien franchise shooter Alien: Rogue Incursion (2024).
In late 2024, Survios announced the sequel to Alien: Rogue Incursion was already in development, which was slated to resolve the game’s cliffhanger while offering up what the studio called “deadlier enemies and more difficult challenges.”
Shortly after the game’s release on Quest 3 in early 2025, Survios paused work on the sequel to release a flatscreen version of the game, which saw a measure of success across console and PC. Worryingly enough, the studio hasn’t publicly spoke about the game’s sequel, even after launch of the flatscreen adaptation.
This follows a broader industry trend of studio shutdowns and mass layoffs, the largest of which was Meta’s revelation earlier this year it was shutting down a number of internal VR studios amid a wider shift in its Reality Labs XR division to instead focus on AI and smart glasses.
Following Meta’s pivot, a reported number of in-progress VR games have been cancelled, including as an unannounced Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel from Meta’s Sanzaru Games, an unannounced Harry Potter VR game for Quest from Skydance Games, and a major project from Moss developers Polyarc.
More recently, social VR platform Rec Room, once valued at $3.5 billion, announced it will be shutting down in June. Additionally, Meta says its own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, will be focusing “almost exclusively” on mobile in the future as Quest players will no longer have access to future content.
