Meta took a massive sledgehammer to the virtual reality medium on January 13th. It laid off over a thousand people from its Reality Labs division, axed three whole studios, shut down its fitness app Supernatural, and cut some workers from its slate of other VR teams. Given how much sway Meta has in the VR space, this was a huge blow. However, there has also reportedly been another casualty in the form of a Harry Potter VR game that was killed during this bloodbath.
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Gamertag VR, one of YouTube’s bigger VR content creators, revealed the existence of this title in his recent video speaking about the Meta layoffs. In it, he talked about how developers had revealed some of the untold impacts of the layoffs to him. Some of these secrets revolved around different studios cutting staff under the radar and other games being canned. Cloud Games, the team behind the beloved rhythmic VR shooter Pistol Whip that recently laid off 70% of its staff, was allegedly making one these now-dead games with Meta, which also allegedly happened to be a new IP. (Meta pulling its funding is likely why the team had to cut so many people.) And a VR Harry Potter game developed by Skydance Interactive was reportedly another one of these projects that is no longer going to see the light of day.
Gamertag didn’t have any details about this mysterious and unannounced Harry Potter VR game, so it’s unclear what exactly it would have been. Regardless, Skydance is a fairly respected VR developer. It co-developed 2020’s The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and its 2022 sequel The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution with the similarly named Skybound Entertainment. The sequel, which stemmed from DLC and grew into a full game, was plagued with bugs and not supported much beyond launch, but that doesn’t overwrite the fervor surrounding its acclaimed predecessor and how it became one of the more cherished and fully featured VR games of that era. This also showed how Skydance has worked successfully within an established property before, which obviously would have been the case with this alleged Harry Potter VR game.
Fans Have Modded VR into Hogwarts Legacy, Though
The magical world of Harry Potter, like many famous franchises, has not had an official VR game. But some brought the series in virtual reality in unofficial ways. Hogwarts Legacy, the divisive 2023 open-world RPG, has been put into VR through fan-made mods. VR modder Luke Ross’ premium Hogwarts Legacy VR mod let players play the game with this new viewpoint. This can also be combined with the SpellCaster mod to give players the ability to cast spells by speaking the commands into the microphone. While these solutions may not have the polish of a more traditionally developed VR game, they show glimpses of what could be possible in a full VR experience and what could have been in Skydance’s canned title.
Skydance also released Skydance’s Behemoth in December 2024, an original VR title that saw players slay giant beings and came out to middling critical reception. The team had not announced what it was working on after Behemoth, either. It remains to be seen how this studio will move forward or if it will see any layoffs as a result of this news.
While perhaps a grim coincidence or an unsubtle yet vague comment on these events, the team recently posted some art of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners on January 14th with the caption, “Some people just want to watch the world burn.” Despite the games both being a few years old, the studio still posts about the two Walking Dead titles, but the timing combined with the caption are hard to ignore, something a few of the replies have also pointed out.
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