Jason Holtman, former director of business for Steam up until last year, is joining the all-star cast that Oculus seems to be lining up. Holtman was hired as the "Head of Platform" which means that he will be taking over the "business development and partnership" side of things according to Oculus, a role that he has plenty of experience in.
This is far from the first big name that Oculus has taken on board though, they've also hired:
• 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
• John Carmack, id Software co-founder
• Michael Abrash, developer of Quake and Half-Life
• David Demartini, Former EA Vice President
(You can thank PC Gamer for this list)
With so many hot-shots on board and no signs of slowing down, what exactly is Oculus is trying to accomplish? Many games support Oculus Rift, but there aren't many triple A games exclusively made for the Oculus, could all it be an attempt to fix that? We don't know the answer yet, but with all these gaming celebrities getting together it seems that Oculus might just be able to rival the success that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have had all to themselves for years now. Only time will tell.
