About an hour ago (it will be by the time I post this) it was announced that Facebook has acquired Oculus VR, makers of the Oculus Rift virtual headset for roughly 2 billion in cash and stocks.
If you review the products that Facebook has purchased/acquired recently you’ll see a very consistent logic in going after products that they can control and lock down to their own services. The goal is very simple, get a technology off the public market so you can control it, brand it, and eventually monetize it with user tracking and advertising. All of which are bad for the Oculus VR’s development.
So what was an exciting new product is instantly becoming a pile of speculation and distrust, not even 7 days after the DK2 kit became available for purchase, and exactly 1 week from April Fools?
Talk about ‘deeply’ suspicious folks! In the first half-hour of the news break on Reddit the /r/oculus threads are full of people overusing ‘sell out’ and just pummeling Palmer Lucky, the man who used to call the shots over at Oculus VR, with insults and insinuations.
Just 1 hour ago Minecraft’s Markus Persson (AKA: Notch) has already publicly hit the NOPE button:
We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014
While this means that Minecraft won’t officially support the Oculus Rift, it really boils down to needing user-based modifications to support the Oculus hardware as Mojang won’t be wasting time on a Facebook property.
This is just hours after the announcement so I would expect Minecraft to be tip of the iceberg when you really sit down and think about who’s in business with Facebook:
– Microsoft
– Oracle
– Nokia
– Zynga
– etc..
Things over at Facebook are a bit of an axis of evil in terms of IT culture, soliciting a slew of ‘dark side’ remarks from upset users replying to Palmer Lucky’s sale post. It’s my opinion that as many people who would complain about losing access to such a device, there’s many more that would understand that this could be the end of a great thing today.
It reminds me a bit of a movie I watched where there’s a jolly fat kid carrying around his bag of candy pieces only to have a bully come along, steal a candy, stick it in his nose, and then drop it back into the bag with a shake to make sure it’s well sorted.
At this point the entire first page of the Oculus VR subreddit is entirely devoted to negative responses to this news, including this juicy revelation:
People are now shifting interest and focus to other projects and /r/virtualreality just got subbed in for a ton of ex-oculus fans.