According to a post on his personal blog, Eugene Wei has left Facebook. After enjoying a few Executive roles at Hulu and Flipboard, Wei joined Fb back in 2015. The post suggests that he would have left in mid-July, roughly around a few weeks after the in-house cinematic VR production team, Oculus Story Studio, was shut down and its 50 or so employees were suddenly thanked for their services.
To save you from reading the (lengthy) blog post, here is what matters/concerns Facebook/Oculus: ”I haven’t spent much time on personal updates here the past several years, but it matters on some topics to know what my personal affiliations are, so I wanted to share that I’ve left Oculus as of mid July. I’m not sure what’s next yet, but I’ve enjoyed having some time to travel to see friends and family, catch up on reading, and get outside on my bike the past few weeks.”
Although it WAS sad to see the Story Studio shut down, many feel like it was always meant to be a ”temporary thing”, a means to create content for the platform while independent studios popped up and/or caught up, which has been the case. This leaves us wondering what the Strategy is now for Facebook’s Oculus; Our best guess is they will concentrate on providing the Hardware and controlling (pun intended) the content platform.
We wish Wei the best and look forward to his next Venture.
