Tag Archives: Oculus Rift

Facebook takes promising future away from gaming for just $2b USD.

It all started with a simple text I received last night. “What did Facebook buy?”

Facebook

Facebook to Acquire Oculus — Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Oculus VR, Inc., the leader in immersive virtual reality technology, for a total of about $2 billion. This includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock (valued at $1.6 billion…

If I wasn’t in a church building at a band practice, I would have said a few things inside of a church that I would regret. Ultimately, Facebook spent $2b USD on a company leading the charge on modern virtual reality implementation, called Oculus VR. All for the sake of “getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow.”

The $2b USD buying price sounds like a blocker buy-out price to prevent Oculus VR from being picked up by a peripheral company or multiplying its valuation by taking in more venture capital funds. However, Zuck’s comments sound like that they’re looking to right a wrong they made that allowed so many games and services to operate through Facebook—to take a page from the Apple playbook of completely locking down the system and turning the Oculus Rift’s final retail product into the Facebook VR app marketplace vector.

Internet cool guy keekerdc has found a series of tweets from a certain well-known mobile developer who has already pulled the plug on any potential Oculus VR port that was picked up by the CEO of peripheral company Razer who then offered to “help out.”

Razer’s nonexistent VR product isn’t the only way out. Sony has been teasing its own VR headset that will eventually be deployed to the PlayStation 4. CCP Games’ dogfighting simulator originally designed for the Oculus Rift, Valkyrie, announced just this last week that they would also be developing the game for Sony’s Project Morpheus.

I’d imagine that there will be plenty of game developers following CCP’s lead and announcing development for Sony’s VR headset in the coming weeks after the Facebook acquisition.

The reaction to a post made by Oculous founder Palmer Luckey in /r/oculus was met with some pretty negative reactions, but this particular comment by /u/AlexHD concisely explains gamers’ hesitation with the Facebook acquisition.

> By Gamers for Gamers
Was the original Kickstarter pitch. But now it’s
> We believe virtual reality will be heavily defined by social experiences
What a shame.

Perhaps there was a little miscommunication involved at Facebook HQ about a question from Zuck…

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E17.

  • Sadly, the dancing will not be happening. Rumor is that the HL3 trademark listing is bogus.
  • SMT4, it’s a game.
  • Oh, this Red Cross bit. Yeah, including war crimes in games just sounds like another bit of red tape for hyper-unrealistic worlds to conform to. By the logic of the Geneva Convention, faction warfare (where one ethnicity of humanoids battles another over control of a bit of space) in the game EVE Online is practically genocide and should have repercussions for the players involved. Yeah, this is going somewhere.
  • SimCity is going to add modding? I thought Maxis was already happy that their title has already been shat on by the collective gaming community and gaming media for the sake of progress.
  • I don’t get how many people get motion sickness from the slightest discontinuity from your body and a display sitting three inches from your eye. I haven’t had the chance to use VR goggles like the Oculus Rift before, but I don’t see what the problem is. Also considering that iOS 7’s minuscule parallaxing feature is causing motion sickness, I wonder if it’s not just a genetic thing.
  • Eidos is relevant… how?
  • Obvious point about trademark registration is obvious.
  • Mighty No 9 = MegaMan. DUH.