Ramen VR, the studio behind the VR game Zenith: The Last City which was released in 2021 has laid off an undisclosed number of employees. At the time of writing, GameBaba Universe spotted one person who posted about the layoff.
“My time at Ramen VR has sadly come to an end as I have been laid off,” wrote game designer Austin Herrington on LinkedIn. “Rough industry, but I’m looking to make a quick transition to my next role!”
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“Ramen VR was easily my favorite games industry job, and I want to thank all of the Ramen VR team for being a part of my game dev journey. I’ll never forget how much I loved working with all of you, and I hope to work with some of you again!”
Ramen VR is a small studio with less than two dozen employees. The studio was co-founded by Lauren Frazier and Andy Tsen (who is also the company’s CEO) in 2019 and has its headquarters in San Francisco.
Ramen VR describes itself as a team of developers “working on solving the hardest problems in game development”. They have raised over $40 million in funding and have been working on their next game as well as tools they believe “will shape the future of game development”.
In December 2024, the studio launched its first AI hackathon which was designed to explore the endless possibilities that can be achieved using AI tools.
“Our intention was to encourage creative recharge and potentially supercharge our dev processes with AI. In the end, the team gained tons of insights and produced various creations. Many of the prototypes turned out to be viable work streams for the future,” the company said.
The use of AI in game development has remained a sticky topic with some creatives and consumers against it for ethical and moral reasons. It has been blamed for the wave of layoffs in the game industry.
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