Facebook has quietly sold its 3D virtual reality sculpting tool to Adobe. According to reports, the development of the Oculus Medium was becoming too expensive for the social media giant and it seemed like the right time to offload it. The sale may also suggest that Facebook is starting to rethink which virtual reality projects it wants to focus on right now. The terms of the deal were not publicly shared.
But we know that there was a lot of money pumped into Medium over the last few years. We also know that the team working on the software wasn’t making a lot of headway to get it where Facebook wanted it to be.
Although we cannot say how much Adobe paid for the deal, there is a feeling that it was absolutely a bargain. Many experts agree that this was more of an offloading process for Facebook as opposed to an acquisition by Adobe. It’s therefore likely that the deal was much more favorable for Adobe but we still don’t know for sure.
It’s not the first time Facebook has run into issues with Oculus. Just recently, the social media company shut down Oculus Story Studio and laid off all employees quietly. We did not see any effort by the company to bring in another player to take over Story Studio.
It seemed like Facebook felt it was time to pull the plug forever. The case has been different though for Oculus Medium. Despite its challenges, Medium has managed to develop a small community of fans. This is why it makes sense for Adobe to take over. Whether the company will be able to take Medium where Facebook had envisioned it remains to be seen.
Over the last few months, we have been trying to guess the exact VR content strategy that Oculus is trying to take. Even though there are still many unknowns, we have been able to get a clear picture of where the company might be going lately. First, the purchase of Beat Saber maker Beat Games indicated that there was an intention from Oculus to focus more on gaming creative tools. The fact that the company is dropping Medium seems to reinforce this fact.
Non-gaming creative tools won’t be getting too much investment as part of the company’s VR content strategy. Facebook seems to believe that applications for cinematic VR content aren’t immediately important right now.
The social media giant is keeping its eyes focused on gaming and we have already seen reports online that the company may also acquire more gaming studios soon. The goal would be to significantly scale the gaming titles available on the Oculus’s VR content platform in the coming months.
Facebook has very ambitious applications for VR. However, right now, there are many hardware challenges. VR for gaming seems like the low hanging fruit in its long-term virtual reality plans. Getting more and more video game creative tools onboard may just give Oculus the push it needs to start making giant strides in the VR space.
