#occulus rift
#occulus rift
On March 25th, Facebook and Occulus announced that they had struck a deal for the purchase of Occulus, the Rift VR Headset’s parent company, for 2 BILLION USD. Predictably, the gaming community erupted into a vitriolic reaction, with many immediately casting down Occulus, demanding refunds, and in what seems almost horrifically standard now, threatening to kill the developers and their families. There seemed to be some consensus that this meant the death of the future that the gaming community had in mind for the project. A betrayal of the grass roots Kickstarter origins of the project in the face of a handover to a mega corporation. The buyout was not unexpected, and there were also talks of other tech companies such as Apple or Google as potential buyers.
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Where the most anxiety exists seems to be around the buyer itself. There is some sense that Occulus had not only sold their company, but in a sense also “sold out”. Facebook is a company that has been rapidly changing over the years, with some actions that some would say were at best questionable and at worst invasive. Privacy concerns, data mining, information selling, Facebook has been a target of its own share of vitriol and anxiety. Even the Facebook origin drama The Social Network ended up casting CEO Mark Zuckerburg in a bit of a negative light near its end. All this has the community casting stones and declaring the death of the VR project. They’re wrong. This is big, and it could make Occulus even better.