• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Jason Holtman (former Steam boss) joins Oculus. List of hires since March.

Courtesy of -SD- in the DK2 thread.

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/jason-holtman-new-hires-luckeys-tale-and-e3/

Please welcome Jason Holtman, Oculus’ new Head of Platform!

A driving force behind Steam since its earliest days, Jason brings incredible experience building entertainment platforms for both users and developers. At Valve, Jason was a pioneer in the digital distribution revolution that’s taken place over the last decade.

...

Jason will be spearheading the business development and partnership side of the Oculus platform working closely with Marshall, head of platform engineering, and David, head of worldwide publishing, with a focus on building the world’s best developer and player VR ecosystem. We’re thrilled to welcome him to the team.

Neil Konzen, former engineer at Valve and one of the original Microsoft employees
Brian Hook, former engineer at RAD (Telemetry) and the original author of 3Dfx Glide
Adrian Wong, former lead systems engineer at Google[x] (Glass)
Ian Field, former engineer at ARM and co-inventor of Cortex-M
Raul Corella, former head of supply chain at JawBone, Monster, and Leap Motion
Laura Fryer, former GM of Epic Seattle and WB Seattle
Paul Pedriana, former lead engineer at EA
David Moore, former engineer at RAD (Granny)
Kenneth Scott, former art director at 343 Studios (Halo 4)
Seneca Menard, former technical artist at id Software
Paul Pepera, former environment artist at Valve and 343 Studios
Brian Sharp, former engineer at Bungie
Aaron Nicholls, former engineer at Valve, 343 Studios, and Microsoft
Matt Alderman, former engineer at Valve and ArenaNet
Cass Everitt, former GPU architect and engineer at Nvidia
Ross O’Dwyer, former at head of development support at Havok
Douglas Lanman, former research scientist at Nvidia Research and MIT Media Lab
…and many, many more: Scott Boyce, Gayan Ediriweera, Michael Berger, Khoi Nguyen, Aaron Toney, Bruce Cleary, Anusha Balan, Sagy Wiessbrod, Christopher Taylor, Soh Tanaka, Matt Mojica, Hyo Jin Kim, Matt Alderman, Steve Arnold, Dan Moskowitz

How many goddamn Valve employees have Oculus poached so far? :lol
 

KiraFA37

Member
Not just Valve, if you look at that list they have been able to hire an amazing amount of talent from various areas of the computer industry.
 

Armaros

Member
The real question is, are Valve and Oculus still collaborating as closely as before the buyout?

They did just show off (to a small group) their latest VR prototype. But it looks like its not getting too much press.
 
Not just Valve, if you look at that list they have been able to hire an amazing amount of talent from various areas of the computer industry.

I was factoring in earlier or noteworthy hires too like Forsyth, Binstock and Abrash. Off the top of my head. And this current list has 4 employees. So in a year they hired 7 Valve employees.

The real question is, are Valve and Oculus still collaborating as closely as before the buyout?

They did just show off (to a small group) their latest VR prototype. But it looks like its not getting too much press.

I assume because it's not a consumer product. At SDD it got bigger press ,since a bigger group of devs were enthusiastic about it and back then people thought it would be a consumer product before the reveal.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
I'm surprised Jon Olick (ex-Naughty Dog/iD) is not on this list. His twitter says he's now at Oculus, working with Carmack on mobile VR.

edit - nvm, as noted below, i'm not sure when he joined, may well have been pre-march
 
They are just getting people excited about what they are working on again. I'm sure there are some cool new features for steam that Valve is working on but that's nowhere near as exciting as working on VR stuff that has proper funding now.
 

Man

Member
Very intimidating team to compete against for other companies looking into the VR hardware scene.
 

Denton

Member
His stint at MS was shortest ever. I guess their "we mean it with PC gaming this time, truly!" proved to be horseshit yet again.

This is fantastic. Oculus being PC focused company means more fantastic people they get, the better for me.
 

Guevara

Member
Sometimes I think: rather than people being excited to work for Oculus, really people are excited to semi-exit gaming and work for big tech safety of Facebook.

I don't blame them at all. Facebook is apparently a great place to work and gaming has been a terrible industry to work in forever.
 

Shin

Banned
Oculus really has build up an amazing team. So many smart heads in one place :)

It's not always a good thing though...
They are on a crazy recruitment spree it seems, hopefully it pays off for whatever they have in store.
 

massoluk

Banned
Is there a reason the word Carmack is missing from the linked page?

edit: Oh, nevermind, new hire since March. I r dumb.
 

iceatcs

Junior Member
Hmm, I think Oculus have an enough team to make own system - Mobile VR.

Can't wait true wireless VR.
 
His stint at MS was shortest ever. I guess their "we mean it with PC gaming this time, truly!" proved to be horseshit yet again.

This is fantastic. Oculus being PC focused company means more fantastic people they get, the better for me.
Eh I was wondering where I remembered the name from (other than from Valve), and yeah that's it. Partly it might also be that the Microsoft's structure and hierarchy was so wildly different from Valve's (Valve having more of open style whereas Microsoft has a lot more strict hierarchy as a massive corporation).

Sometimes I think: rather than people being excited to work for Oculus, really people are excited to semi-exit gaming and work for big tech safety of Facebook.

I don't blame them at all. Facebook is apparently a great place to work and gaming has been a terrible industry to work in forever.
They quite certainly aren't going for Oculus because their previous places have been terrible, but because they have a chance to be at Oculus doing something truly massive. I'd take a wild guess that all, or almost all, of the Oculus employees are very excited about VR's potential.
A lot of these guys have already been working more on various technologies and stuff like that instead of working directly on games.
 
Top Bottom