Oculus has become increasingly popular ever since their successful $2 million Kickstarter. Numerous people have purchased their Oculus Rift developer kit. One could say it was only a matter of time before other companies began head-hunting and competing. But nobody could have guessed who finally purchased Oculus and all of its employees and products: Facebook. This Tuesday, Facebook confirmed that they will acquire Oculus for $2 billion, mostly in Facebook stock. The purchase is very surprising, and has triggered mountains of negative feedback from both investors and developers. Everything is expected to be settled as early as the second quarter of this year.
“Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow.” Mark Zuckerberg said, explaining the Oculus purchase. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play, and communicate.” According to the press release, Oculus will stay in its current location and will continue to develop their virtual reality products. However, it has not been revealed what influence Facebook will have on the Rift and other products. They have only said, “Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas.” This had led to a lot of speculation from users. Most are imagining the worst case scenario.
CEO of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, went to Reddit to appeal his decision. However, almost all responses have been negative, describing the situation as “a lot of nice words for ‘we couldn’t say no to $2 [billion]'”. Perhaps the biggest criticism is the amount of money Oculus collected from Kickstarter. The purpose of Kickstarter is for startups to get their feet in the water and make an exciting product for consumers. But now Oculus is selling out, and as a result destroyed any hope of a return on investment for the original backers. In addition, many are worried about advertisements, social media, and other influences that Facebook will have on Oculus. One user wrote on Oculus’s website, “I have no doubt no matter what this means, for sure they will use highly sophisticated metadata collection of users for profit.”
Shortly after the announcement, Minecraft creator Markus Persson announced that the Oculus Rift version of his game would cease development. He says, “But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.” And because of that Minecraft will never get an official Oculus Rift version. Many other indie game developers are sure to follow suit. As for mainstream game companies, whether they will develop for the Oculus Rift now that it is owned by Facebook is unclear. Sony and other companies are now working on their own virtual reality hardware, which will compete with Oculus. It is too soon to see what will come of Oculus, but most people think it’s for the worse.
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