

Oculus Refund. - shaurya

Oculus: Is it not a good idea if the founders of Oculus give some part of the profit to the initial backers in kickstarters.
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pixel
I'm so confused about this whole thing -- Supporting Oculus in Kickstarter did
not entitle those people to any equity in the company, they received exactly
the level of reward that they chose. Why would they think that?

~~~
ggchappell
This is an interesting question, worthy of some psychological/sociological
research, I think.

Certainly people who invested in this must have had some expectations beyond
just getting the chosen reward. The primary reward was a developer kit. That's
not much good if the product is never offered for sale. So there must have
been some expectation of that.

Note that the Rift is still not available for sale. Will it ever be? Maybe
not, if Facebook decides to kill it and incorporate the technology into some
other project. Will the end result be some DRM'd-to-the-hilt Facebook-games-
only device? It's possible.

Going further, I expect that many of the investors had a "we're all in this
together" feeling. To be fair, the Kickstarter page[1] encouraged this. Some
quotes:

"We hope you share our excitement about virtual reality, the Rift, and the
future of gaming."

"... we want to make the Rift available to all game developers, today, so they
can be part of the development process. Kickstarter makes that possible. Your
voice will be critical to making the Rift hardware and software as great as
they can be."

All this is just guessing, by the way. I'm not involved in any of this stuff.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-
rift-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-
into-the-game)

------
catmanjan
Oculus is owned by a public entity now, it would be a disservice to Facebook
shareholders.

The whole situation is FUBAR, wasn't the whole point of crowd sourcing so that
companies wouldn't have to sell out like this?

