Award-Winning Oculus Story Studio Unexpectedly Shut Down by Facebook
The VR storytelling studio behind Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica is being shut down.
The turnover and tumult continues at Oculus as its parent company, Facebook, announced that they would be shuttering award-winning Oculus Story Studio today. This groundbreaking team that won an Emmy Award last year for Henry, the adorable VR story about a porcupine on his birthday, is being shut down. They also released the highly praised Dear Angelica earlier this year and made a splash in 2015 with their Lost VR demo. All three VR demos will remain on the Oculus Home store, according to Jason Rubin, Oculus VP Content.
This bad news comes on the back of Brendan Iribe stepping down as CEO of the company, Zenimax being awarded $500 million due to an NDA breach, and Palmer Luckey's departure from the company at the end of March 2017. Oculus did not have a booth at CES 2017, and their booth space from E3 2016 is being occupied by NVIDIA this year. Something is up at Oculus.
Perhaps Facebook is stepping away from the Oculus brand altogether with an intention to rebrand the division as Facebook VR? No matter what the motivation was to shut down Oculus Story Studio, it is definitely a head scratcher. They were truly pioneers of a new medium of storytelling and Shacknews will forever be grateful for their great work.
Shackers with Rifts should definitely download Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica now on Oculus Home right now. They are all free.
Check out this footage of Lost.
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Asif Khan posted a new article, Award-Winning Oculus Story Studio Unexpectedly Shut Down by Facebook
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That's too bad. I really like this form of story telling. I want an Incredibles story in this format. It's probably something that's very labor intensive, something akin to making a feature length movie back in the days when the first Toy Story was made. Since there isn't physically an audience large enough yet that would consume enough content to make this profitable yet, it makes good economic sense. However this is a betrayal to the "we're in this for the long game" that they continue to spout as their strategy.
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