Oculus Is Closing Its Emmy-Winning VR Studio

Virtual reality company Oculus VR announced today that it is "winding down" its Story Studio, a division that made the Emmy Award-winning VR short Henry.

Oculus executive Jason Rubin said in a blog post that the decision to close the studio came after "careful consideration."

"We've decided to shift our focus away from internal content creation to support more external production," Rubin said. "As part of that shift, we'll be winding down Story Studio."

He continued: "Now that a large community of filmmakers and developers are committed to the narrative VR art form, we're going to focus on funding and supporting their content. This helps us turn our internal research, development, and attention towards exciting but unsolved problems in AR and VR hardware and software."

Rubin went on to assure people that Oculus remains "absolutely committed to growing the VR film and creative content ecosystem" in the wake of shutting down Story Studio.

In 2016, Oculus announced a commitment of $250 million to help fund VR projects around the world, $50 million of which will go towards non-gaming, "experiential" VR content.

"In the same way we invested in the third-party game developers who made the incredible content lineups for Rift and Gear VR, we're going to allocate more resources to third-party creatives to build out the VR storytelling library," Rubin said.

Some of Story Studio's other works included Lost, Dear Angelica, and Quill. These films, as well as Henry, will continue to be available from the Oculus Store.

In other Oculus news, the company has confirmed that it won't have a booth at E3 this year.