Notch was working with the Oculus team to bring Minecraft to the Rift – and then the Facebook news hit. He immediately cancelled the project.
I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.
And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.
It seems like Notch sums up the general response to Facebook acquiring Oculus pretty well.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but facebook is definitely not cool anymore. I used to think it was. It was minimal in design, restrictive in allowed content and reach.
So now, for some reason, I don’t mind Google as much as Facebook. Google has more of my real information, and gaining more of it everyday. But some how they give me more and more value by providing it to them, that I don’t care as much. Facebook just seems to try take more and more of my information without providing any additional, useful features to me.
Or it could be that anything I do with Facebook, they want me to share it with other people. And somehow I don’t care if the giant company knows things, but I don’t want everyone, even my friends to know or rather be distracted by some pointless things. Facebook games are annoying, and their primary purpose seems to be to annoy every friend you have on the site. Google games ( those on the play store) are just games. I’ve never been automatically annoyed by a friend to play any of them.
“Virtual reality is going to change the world”
Wow that statement gave me a rush back to the 1990’s.
Yeah, I played VR game in the early to mid 90’s in an arcade with a headset and everything. The graphics were terrible and laggy, but still fun. It was the first experience of a death match for me, I think. Or maybe it was right around the time of Doom. Still, it was pretty cool to shoot people with a bullet that moved slowly enough to see move. I was really confused why it never took off with better graphics when the became available.
Edit: It was at the Chicago Battetech center, for those interested. It wasn’t related to MechWarrior, obviously.
Edited 2014-03-26 17:05 UTC
Reminds me of something… ah yes, the Segway was going to change the world, too.
Minecraft runs on PS3 and Xbox 360. Does Facebook really have a worse record than Microsoft and Sony? I think a lot of this anti-FB sentiment is overblown. I don’t know if they’ll be a good steward or not, but Facebook is not some kind of uniquely evil company, and indeed, seems to have been fairly hands-off with Instagram, so that’s a good precedent.
Not to mention that Notch keeps a highly active Facebook presence.
I don’t think “Notch sums up the general response to Facebook acquiring Oculus pretty well” (nor do I think Thom can back that up). It seems to me the general sense is “huh?” most often with a dash of wait-and-see.
Notch’s statement feels hypocritical to me (for the reasons you pointed out and more), and I think his reasons are opaque.
Would that the Ars Technica comments matched your pattern. Lots of unrest over there.
Because Ars and Notch represent a consensus? Can you back that up. I have been talking to game developers I know, and listening to a broad set of opinions from a lot of sources and I personally am seeing far more wait and see (or positive) comments than I am seeing negative.
That is the problem with arguing though anecdote, there are always counter anecdote. Give it a couple of months and we will see actual data of how devs are responding.
Yeah… for me, Oculus is like Google Glass… seems like it’s been in the news for like two decades, and it still isn’t out yet. I’ll reserve judgment for when the damn thing actually gets released
His concerns are more specific to Facebook as a game platform.
Sony and Microsoft actually has a fairly good track record when it comes to indy gaming, while Facebook has a history of exerting a lot of control over developers.
And he could have addressed those concerns with Oculus. He could find out how independent they were, how tied to Facebook infrastructure they would be. Instead he just made assumptions and a snap judgment.
Why? Judging early based on previous behaviour seems like an entirely valid strategy to me.
Besides which this is Notches own opinion, he doesn’t have to do anything to make anybody else happy. He also happens to be a position to back up his opinion, unlike a lot of other people. So good for him.
And on Android phones and a multitude of other platforms. But I don’t think Notch had a personal investment in any of those platforms which they then decided to pass on to a parent company regardless of his wishes.
After all they were the ones willing to be bought.
They could have said no.
Would you say no to 2 billion dollars?
It depends if the goal was just to get rich at any cost, or try to make a product I would be proud of.
The way it looks currently, Facebook can kill the project any time they feel like it, while keeping all the relevant IP.
Agreed. But killing the project would be a pretty poor investment for the money spent. I suspect their investment arm is thinking long term, though it seems at great odds for the technical arm to live up to the promise. More than likely Facebook with turn the Oculus into something specialized for their tech. In any event it will no longer serve as a beacon for VR fans.
Edited 2014-03-26 18:21 UTC
Oculus took on venture capital, once you do that, once you engage in an undertaking larger than you can bootstrap or pay for out of pocket; you have to act in your investor’s interest.
I am not saying it is impossible to build something like their product without outside investment, but it would be very very hard.
Still, they didn’t need to say yes to the first offer around the corner.
Now, who knows if their product will ever be sold and in what form.
The “they” here includes the investors, who have a big say in the matter. So yes “they” may have taken the deal even if were for facebook to kill it.
Nor is it likely that Facebook came out of the blue and scoop them up. There is indication that multiple companies bid on them, and that Oculus took the best bid.
But let us take a step back aside from the rampant speculation, name calling, and ad-hominem; can anyone point to any evidence that Facebook has any ill intent?
Facebook is a paranoid company, they know that their userbase is aging, they have far less cache with younger users than they used to, and that they could become irrelevant just as quickly as bebo, friendster, myspace, orkut, et al did… unless they diversify.
While the folk on OSNews see this as some kind of evil act, I see it as a company desperate to invest in their own future, fighting to remain relevant. As such I think they are going to be making a lot of investments and acquisitions like this over the next couple of years.
The commenters on OSNews (like so many other sites) just react out of their gut and rarely engage in any kind of meaningful debate when one of their enemy de jour come up.
People with ethics who care about their product and remember where they came from?
Gaining money doesn’t have to have a negative impact on ethics. We’ll know what the Oculus people are made of after Facebook asserts their control.
Actually, that seems to be the case quite often.
I agree completely. Money changes people and people change companies. I’m fond of saying that a person can be smart but people are stupid. Joining Facebook may very well be the end of their “individual” intelligence.
On a side note I don’t think blame is the right word for any of this. That huge sum of money that Facebook threw at Oculus could easily be a measure of success for a small company, especially if the extra resources allow them to do far more than they could have without the money. As I said before, time will tell.
Its not really $2 Billion. Its $400 Million in cash and $1.6 Billion in stock. Problem is that by the time they are allowed to cash in that stock, it may only be worth half as much.
it does make you wonder.
The world’s people, inside a virtual reality game.
how many can enlighten from the illusion?
When you fund a tech start up with a vision then there’s an unwritten code that they will remember where they come from and continue to have a close connection to their grass roots source. When then they turn around and sell out to a big company almost immediately, you’re basically just guaranteed that the platform is going to be controlled and monetized (see ads) , and guess what? You helped with the start up costs.
When the Oculus Rift came about, I was excited. All I wanted was Skyrim/WoW compatibility.
Now, I doubt I will ever have my wish granted.
But perhaps you can play the myriad of farmville clones instead, would that make you happy?
My God, I think I’ve got it!
This is just the first stage in a vertical integration strategy. You heard it here first: Facebook are going to buy Linden Lab, and then merge the social and immersive aspects of Second Life with Facebook and Oculus!
Welcome to Snow Crash.
Actually, the integration between Oculus and Second Life is already happening: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/Second-Life…
No. lol
But since John Carmack is now a Facebook employee, I figure I might see an OpenGL rendered version of Facebook web site.
Someone else will make another VR set eventually. And bring me closer to a holodeck.
Facebook will make a tech-demo and then stagnate and not do anything interesting ever again.
Openness will change the world. VR needs 3D which relies on blobs. Until it changes, 3D and VR will be second class citizens. Really!
People don’t even like putting on a pair of 3D glasses on their face, a VR headset isn’t going to get any smaller than those. You will get some enthusiasts for sure but it isn’t going to change the world.
Agreed, not until it can be integrated with regular glasses or even contacts. And there are people who won’t even flirt with the idea of sticking a lens in their eye, augmented reality or not.
I should wear glasses (I am long sighted which tbh isn’t really a problem, I just put the text size down) and I could wear contacts … nah not happening.
I have a pair of glasses when my eyes are really tired they make the difference.
While I agree that it’s a stupidly over-hyped sentiment, a pair of 3D glasses is almost worthless compared to something that does head tracking.
The Rift gives perspective via parallax AND head-tracking while I’d be happy just with the kind of head-tracking you get from Johnny Lee’s wiimote head tracking demo.
http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
Too bad the parallax in stereography, while striving to give us more realistic view, is after all so wrong… (hold your hand in front of your face while looking at something distant – you’ll be basically seeing two blurry semi-transparent hands; OTOH look at your hand – and now the background will be blurry and “doubled”; that is how the natural parallax works)
You have looked at CastAR, right?
They’re a pair of glasses with a camera and microprojectors attached. Add a small clip-on, and you get Occulus-style VR. The rest of the time, you just look at a special retroreflective surface, and bam, there’s your virtual world.
Yes you did. That is why I don’t get the higher end kickstarter values. You make an investment with no returns and no control, and yes that means they can sell off the company and run for the hils.
Beyond small displays and motion/position sensors, there is the actual image rendering and algorithms to compensate and anticipate head movement while displaying animated 3D images.
(For example, a GPU could render an image larger than the screen and do 2D shifts/rotates for very short latency image corrections. I don’t know wether that idea is crazy, but it seems more effective than generating 3D images with insane latency. Maybe a 3D driver could be optimised for short latency tweaks in the middle of the 3D pipeline.)
What is missing is firms making 3D gear suitable for those displays : Mainly nVidia, AMD and Intel.
I am surprised there is so little involvement on that side. I wonder if they will want to help ‘f’ or, instead, try to market the stuff themselves, for example nVidia sells 3D glasses.
I am hoping (without illusions) that there will be some standardisation…
The Time magazine has now an article about how it all happened.
http://time.com/39577/facebook-oculus-vr-inside-story/
Heh, that article. Hype much? Clueless much?
Uh…..you mean that platform that pretty much no-one is using yet? That one? I was under the impression that in order to be a “global communications platform” you had to actually have a user-base that is, you know, using your platform. Preferably on a global scale and not just in California.
Ah yes, because we didn’t have 3d in games before that. I must have been dreaming playing games like Mercenary, Gunship, Falcon 3, Elite etc etc etc etc.
No, just no.
And it’s still Facebook, no matter how much these guys talks about how nothing has changed. 2 billion dollars changes everything.
Edited 2014-03-27 11:20 UTC
I think the same. Just bringing the article into the discussion.
Yep, and thanks for that. It has some interesting parts.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure I should trust anything this guy writes considering that he’s either stupid enough to think Carmack invented 3D in games or too lazy to look it up.