Facebook buys Oculus VR; the gaming community’s response
If you’re a gamer, you may have already heard the news surrounding the Oculus Rift. On Tuesday, Facebook announced that they purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion dollars.
According to Game Informer, the acquisition happened practically over night. For a few months prior, the team met up with Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg, and he tried out the Oculus equipment. He was apparently very impressed by it.
Oculus CEO Brandon Iribe told Game Informer, “When Mark got in and tried some of the latest demos, he asked, ‘What can I do to help? What can Facebook do to help?’”
In the aforementioned announcement, Zuckerberg claims that he won’t make any initial changes to Oculus and let them develop independently.
“Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate,” Zuckerberg said, “The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there’s a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We’re going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games.”
Zuckerburg goes on to say that he has big dreams beyond gaming for the Oculus.
“After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences,” Zuckerburg said. “Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
There’s been a lot of backlash from the gaming community over the acquisition, however.
Game development company Mojang had been considering developing Minecraft for the Rift, but after the announcement they tweeted that they were pulling out.
Founder of Mojang, Markus Persson, wrote in his personal blog, “Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.”
Indeed, it’s a bit strange to think of Facebook being in direct competition with Sony and the Playstation 4. For those that may not have heard, Sony is developing their own VR headset for the PS4 called Project Morpheus. Even Microsoft has hinted that they’ve been looking at VR for awhile, and well, let’s face it, if Sony’s building a headset, Microsoft is probably doing it too. I wouldn’t be surpised if within the next year we hear something about a VR headset from Microsoft.
I think Zuckerburg is well intentioned in the acquisition. He sounds like he has big aims for the company, even farther beyond Oculus VR’s own initial aims. He’s got the money to get them there, that they may not have had before. This could be a good thing.
As with most gamers, I am apprehensive about saying it is a good thing. I think only time will tell. Hopefully Facebook doesn’t mess this up, and maybe, just maybe, we may end up with some really fantastic tech.
Pyrosmania Games 