
Early Supporters of Oculus VR Denounce Facebook Buyout - RougeFemme
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/early-supporters-of-oculus-vr-unnerved-upset-by-facebook-purchase/?_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=technology&_r=0
======
marknutter
The reaction by the community is completely irrational. Facebook has largely
left Parse, Instagram, and WhatsApp alone. It hasn't required people to use
Facebook to log into those services nor has it shoved ads in Parse developers'
faces. By all accounts, they simply seem to be buying companies with great
products and potential and just giving them the resources to continue to grow
and improve.

It makes absolutely zero sense for Facebook to meddle with Oculus by pursuing
any of the ridiculous paths people are worried about like trying to integrate
the Rift into the Facebook platform or turn away from the gaming community or
charge for the SDK or any other tinfoil scenarios people are assuming Facebook
will pursue.

The truth is, the Sony announcement was a significant shot across the bow at
Oculus. From all accounts their headset is already on par with the rift, plus
they have a _massive_ built in user base. Oculus may have had the support and
interest of a subset of hardcore gamers behind them but that's small potatoes
compared to the console market. With Facebook, they may actually have a
fighting chance to retain their position as the leader in VR.

On the upside, however, everyone is canceling their DK2 orders which should
allow me to get mine earlier :)

~~~
Riesling
> The reaction by the community is completely irrational.

I think you are missing the big picture because you are not realizing the
potential of this technology (Mark probably has, that's why he bought Oculus).
VR will absolutely change the way we interact with each other in the future.
This is not about gaming at all. This is about people wearing VR headsets
(which will probably look like sunglasses) in everyday situations (augmented
reality). Oculus is the leader in this area and Facebook is in control now.
For many people a possible utopia has turned into a dystopia over night.

~~~
marknutter
I'm pretty sure everybody who's even remotely interested in VR tech
understands the potential it has to change the way we communicate and interact
with us. But that's certainly not the only application, and I highly doubt
Facebook will pursue that angle to the detriment of every other possibly
application for VR, including gaming. If I were Mark, I would have bought
Oculus, too. Not because it fits well with Facebook the product, but because
VR is going to be amazing. The only thing I would have done differently than
Mark is buy Oculus earlier.

~~~
leoc
One thing is that the Rift really _isn 't_ going to match well with Facebook
the highly-mass-market product for a long time. I think the DK1's modest GPU
demands have given people a misleading impression of what CV1 will actually
cost to run. If Oculus takes the high road and ships a 2560×1440@90Hz CV1
before the end of 2014 then the total buy-in cost at launch could be $800-$900
even for most people who already have their own gaming PC handy: you'd need a
powerful and power-hungry GPU, and no currently-existing SLI/Crossfire setup
is going to cut it either.

With such uncertain prospects for going it alone it seems clear why Oculus
would want to be bought by Facebook; like a typical FB acquisition, what's
less clear is why FB would want to buy Oculus, since the Rift will have
comparatively few owners at first even if all goes well. Three possibilities:

1) Zuckerberg is worried that Oculus and all the other VR efforts could fail,
leaving FB without a Next Big Thing to evolve into in future years as VR
becomes affordable

2) Zuckerberg is worried that Oculus could fail while Project Morpheus
succeeds, leaving VR a failure on the PC but successful on consoles. Sony
would love to have its own hit social network, or to make Facebook grovel to
gain access to the PS4 platform; Facebook would not enjoy it so much

3) Zuckerberg is another starry-eyed Oculus-loving geek, but unlike all the
others he has the spare change to make sure that the VR dream stays alive

My hunch is that it's some combination of all three. Other people are worried
about FB wanting to exert proprietary control over the Rift "platform"; I'm
less worried about that. If the Rift is a hit on the PC it will have
competitors, which will put manners on Facebook and/or just give people
somewhere else to go. If Oculus had gone it alone and failed, likely there
would be no successful competitors for several years either, and FB logins
would be the least of our concerns.

------
bhouston
This is a weird situation. Sometimes when a product goes ultra-mainstream as
FB is likely trying to do with Oculus Rift, it doesn't matter a huge amount if
it losses its first supporters.

But Oculus Rift is losing the core of the gaming community here. And that is
its target demographic for both early and medium term adoption, it isn't a
small fringe community. (It isn't just early supporters who are mad, it is the
core of the gaming community that was excited about this.) If I was in
management at FB or Oculus Rift and cared about its future, I would be
freaking out and trying to figure out damage control strategy (which I haven't
yet seem arise, although maybe I have missed it so far.)

This really open up the space for competitors to take a large bit out of what
seemed to be a clear leader.

~~~
stormcrowsx
I don't see why gamers would care who owns it. I'm interested in the Oculus
Rift and I don't care if it was McDonald's that made it, if it works good
they'll get my business.

~~~
shubb
Gamers do care about that kind of thing - they have a personal relationship
with brands like Sony, Microsoft, and the major game studios. They have a
history, as a group, of getting cartoonishly upset with those brands.

Rift is going into competition against entrenched gaming brands like Sony. I
believe that Sony is too risk averse to invent something like Oculus, but they
are certainly skilled enough to clone it but better, rapidly.

If Oculus is launching a second best product against companies that already
own the market, they need to be percieved as David vs Goliath. Now they are
not.

~~~
stormcrowsx
They need to be perceived as David vs Goliath only to fulfill your desires,
but it has nothing to do with whether or not they will be successful.

Gamers do not care about the holiness or honor of a company, that's hacker
culture. The only loyalty they have to a company is if that company continues
to make stuff they want to play. Gamers want a good experience and that's it.
Look at how good EA does despite having oppressive DRM and a horrible history
of customer service.

~~~
shubb
You are reading my post as very emotionally driven. As a non-gamer, and non-VR
headset buyer, I am reading about this the same way you might read about
defense companies.

You, and the parent post, believe that gamers as a market, unlike sell phone
consumers, buy on purely pragmatic grounds. Given that more money is spent on
game advertising than game development, I would say the industry money
disagrees.

------
mathattack
The real question is what this will do to other Kickstarter campaigns. It
highlights that you are not buying a share in a company. The savvy early
adopters should realize as soon as outside money comes in, the company is
headed to the highest value exit no matter what.

~~~
ingenieros
There are many well funded companies taking advantage of the Kicstarter
platform to run their product/market fit experiments and generating media buzz
while they are it. If you think about it it's actually really smart on their
part, but shady nonetheless. Reading some of their backer reactions on
Kickstarter and all across the interwebz one gets the feeling that this will
most certainly have a negative impact in the short term, but hopefully these
same backers will start doing more research into the people unscrupulously
soliciting money when in fact they don't really need it at all.

~~~
ubercore
It doesn't feel shady to me, as long as one remembers you're _buying just that
particular product_. I'm really happy to have the chance to support even a
major company experimenting if it provides a product more suited to me than
they could have done without crowdfunding.

The real tension in my eyes is that the most effective kickstarters seem to be
ones that get people emotionally involved or attached some way. Joining a
"revolution", or playing on nostalgia or a sense of community. It makes an
effective kickstarter, but can lead to trouble in cases like Oculus where
(even though they didn't and never did), people felt like they owned a small
part of Oculus for kickstarting it.

~~~
mathattack
True - it's about an early right to buy the product, not the company. I have
to keep reminding myself that. Do the kickstarter participants feel the same
way?

------
stickydink
As a reasonably active member of the subreddit, which is (or was, it seems)
reasonably rational and mature, there seems to be quite a lot of anti-fanboy
sort of behavior going on here.

Amongst the mountains of screams and cries, this is a good place to get
Palmer's point of view on it.

[http://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey](http://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey)

I got a DK1 through kickstarter, and I had my DK2 on order within minutes of
the reddit pre-announcement. So I'm a big fan. As many have said, I'm waiting
to see if the likes of Carmack stick around -- though from his Twitter feed it
seems he's fairly comfortable with the deal. I'm reasonably excited about all
this, to be honest.

------
not_paul_graham
Isn't this article stating what is an obvious conclusion from a ton of other
links currently on the HN homepage?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7470097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7470097)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469237)

------
nilkn
I like Notch's post on reddit
([http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21cy9n/the_future_of...](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21cy9n/the_future_of_vr/cgbx1nu)):

You got my respect before I met you. You kept it when I met you. I understand
that this happened because people with investments in the company saw big
sacks of dollar bills. I understand you're probably under a big NDA and stuck
in golden handcuffs, and that this might be a frustrating situation.

I just hope you got your fair share. VR will live on. Thank you for being part
of making it finally happen.

I really wish this hadn't happened.

------
thenmar
I don't get it... how else do they think a consumer version would ever be
manufactured? I imagine manufacturing thousands of consumer grade custom tiny
high definition displays would approach a billion dollars alone. What did
these guys expect, another kickstarter? If anything, Facebook has just created
the best chance yet that their dreams will come true.

~~~
pfraze
The $76MM series B, plus the pedigree gained by Carmack, seemed to suggest
capital wasn't impossible to get.

~~~
marknutter
$76M is a bit short of $2B. Also, Oculus now has access to word class legal,
PR, and marketing teams via Facebook. A lot of the money that would have been
sunk into basic administrative expenses can now go directly toward product
engineering.

~~~
pfraze
Right, but it doesn't follow that a purchase by Facebook is the right choice.
You take investment, you're choosing your partners and your owners. It matters
to me that Facebook was the one they chose.

