Less than a year after it won an Emmy for its virtual reality short film Henry, Oculus Story Studio is being shut down.
What's notable here is that a lot of people's livelihoods will be affected; it also showcases how Oculus VR is changing how it spends money. In a company blog post, Oculus exec Jason Rubin stated that "we'll be winding down Story Studio" in an effort to focus more on funding "content creation" from folks outside the company.
"We’ve decided to shift our focus away from internal content creation to support more external production," wrote Rubin. "This helps us turn our internal research, development, and attention towards exciting but unsolved problems in AR and VR hardware and software."
An Oculus representative told TechCrunch that roughly 50 jobs are expected to be lost as Oculus Story Studio is shut down; the company intends to try and find affected staffers new jobs within either Oculus or Facebook.
While Oculus Story Studio produced a number of VR shorts during its roughly two-year lifespan (Dear Angelica, Lost) it was best known for the aforementioned Henry, which was the studio's public debut. In 2015 it even publicly released the UE4 assets used to make Henry.
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