In Brief
Meta has announced the shutdown of Crayta, effective March 3, 2023, less than two years after acquiring the metaverse platform.
Crayta didn’t become popular enough to support its continued development.
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Unit 2 Games has announced that its free-to-play game creation and sharing tool Crayta will shut down on March 3. The company was acquired by Meta (at the time, Facebook) in June 2021 and will have only survived one year and nine months.
Crayta launched on Google Stadia on July 1, 2020. Google had ambitious plans for Stadia, its cloud gaming platform, including the integration of VR and AR. However, Stadia ceased operations, and its closure wasn’t connected to the shutdown of Crayta. In March 2021, the platform launched on the Epic Games Store, and later that year, it was acquired by Meta along with Unit 2 Games.
Players who have invested time into the platform should urgently make screen recordings of their favorite games and worlds to preserve their memories and share them with others. The shutdown of the platform results in the loss of creative effort put into world-building games, which is a risk in these types of games.
The team wrote in a Medium post:
“While we’ve expanded Crayta significantly since launch, we’ve unfortunately not seen quite enough growth for us to justify continuing. Google Stadia shut its doors recently, which was the initial launch platform for Crayta, so we’ve decided that now is the right time to bring things to a close, despite the dedicated efforts of our team and our community.”
Before its closure, Crayta will schedule activities and events, including celebratory play-along streams, and help and support to enhance one’s creative skills in the future. However, the Unit 2 Games studio will still exist.
As the year started, Meta has been very unpredictable with its decisions. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg’s company decided to shut down one of Oculus’s most popular games, Echo VR, causing a misunderstanding in the gamer community. Yet the company is still acquiring other VR and AR-related companies.
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