The studio behind Walkabout Mini Golf confirmed layoffs and a course correction to strategy in the wake of Meta's shifting platform ambitions.
Mighty Coconut joins Cloudhead Games and many others in layoffs, with the studios representing two ends of a spectrum of focused VR development that has been influenced directly or indirectly by the shifting spending and priorities at Facebook and Meta. Cloudhead's Pistol Whip and Mighty Coconut's Walkabout Mini Golf remain two of the best ways you can spend your time in a VR headset, but the engines of creativity behind those works keep changing.
Mighty Coconut posted contact information for several former workers to LinkedIn in an attempt to see them recruited elsewhere, and confirmed to UploadVR roughly eight jobs ended in the change with 27 continuing full time.
"We’re feeling the economic pressures of the VR space. It’s an incredibly rewarding place to build games—but it’s also a tough one, especially for studios of our size," a statement reads. "After a lot of long conversations, trimming expenses, and careful number-crunching, it became clear that reducing our size by about 25% was the only sustainable path forward. As a result, we’re losing some immensely talented people that would be an asset to any studio. "
New DLC courses will be priced $4.99 in virtual reality with the parallel Pocket Edition for iPhones seeing a full pause to development, so no new courses outside VR. Existing paid DLC courses will remain $3.99 in VR.
"We’d like to keep crossplay between VR and mobile functional for as long as we can, but we will also be sunsetting that at some point," a development update note explained. "We will be sure to announce that in advance once we do."
When it comes to scheduling, Mighty Coconut is also planning a bigger pause to the release schedule over summer to leave them with one less course in their planned schedule for the year, even as work continues on courses for 2027.
Additional activities in the game like chess and slingshots remain functional but further development is being put into new courses first.
"We feel confident that with these changes, Walkabout Mini Golf will be around for many, many courses to come," the note reads.
Walkabout Mini Golf was shown at standalone headset demo events powered by operating systems from Google and Valve, but Galaxy XR launched with limited controller availability and Steam Frame is still distributing development kits.
