Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

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Kojack
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Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by Kojack »

*Sigh*

Reading this on the train to work is not the best way to start a day of assignment marking.

The oculus forums have exploded, there's a battle between two kinds of people:
- people saying they want to cancel their DK2 order, or saying they wouldn't have ordered if this news came out being orders opened.
- people fanatically white knighting oculus and insulting anybody that doesn't act like this is the greatest news ever.

I have a boycott list I follow fairly strictly:
- any restaurant that serves cuttlefish (they are very intelligent. kittens of the sea)
- gloria jean coffee (provided funding to an anti gay rights lobby group and the co-founder ran a support group that cured lesbianism using demonic exorcisms).
- local hotdog place (owner tweeted that he tells customers to f*** off if they have a complaint)
- hungry jacks in the queen street mall (manager was rude to me 7 years ago)
- facebook

I guess oculus will be an exception now, I've already spent over $900 on them. But if something better comes along, I'm jumping ship. I'm also going to feel icky doing anything with it now.

Notch has stated that he's cancelled plans for official Oculus support in Minecraft due to this deal.

On the bright side... oculus get more cash to develop stuff, so might have more weight to make deals with parts makers like samsung.

I'm still hoping this is just an april fools joke that was released too early.

(This forum has a good history of being professional, so let's keep things more sensible here than the oculus forums are at the moment).
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by Klaim »

About notch, he even wrote a full article: http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-realit ... the-world/

Personally:

1. I am happy that they get fundings;
2. I am so sad that they lose control of what they are doing (they will, no doubt);
3. I am angry that it's Facebook.

I have a Facebook account to keep track with some friends worldwide, but I'm more and more not going there often.
I also hate how Facebook manage data, makes decisions and basically do wrong things all the time. They don't understand people, they only understand data.

To me it's sad news and I'm quite not understanding people not seeing the major problem there.

Maybe there will be a metaverse. Do we want it to be controlled by Facebook?
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by Kojack »

I saw an interesting post from someone (can't remember) the other day, saying that the way facebook, google+, twitter and others work is like if each phone provider only let you call others on the same network. Own an at&t account? Then you can't call someone on Vodafone. Or if every web site had to pick one browser to work in.
All these social networks lock people in to only sharing with others on the same network. We need them to open up!

If they make a facebook login be required to get the sdk, I'm bailing.
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by TheSHEEEP »

What is even more off-putting about this is that Rift was financed by fans.
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by Zonder »

well i won't be buying one now wait for someone else to release somthing
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by SomeFusion »

I knew I should have waited before ordering the Dev Kit 2... I'd not have done it, if I knew this was coming.
I really liked that they where a independant company. It's probably right that they may get better deals faster now, but paying with your independance?
In the end, I guess when someone waves with billions of cash in front of your nose, most of us would get weak :-)

*edit* And I don't believe in their "we'll stay independant" yadda yadda. Facebook is here to sell us ads, and thats what they are going todo in the long run. *edit*
*edit2* Actually Zuckerberg just confirmed what I've suspected:
If this becomes a network where people can be communicating and buying things and virtual goods, and there might be advertising in the world, but we need to figure that out down the line.
I got this from http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/26/can- ... #continued
I'm sure there are lots of people just waiting to play farmville in VR mode :-D
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by madmarx »

It is funny to think J.Carmack has quit Id software to join Facebook (as a side effect of working on vr).
Anyway, I don't feel very considered. Basically, it means that even if oculus don't sell anything for 10 years, they can do all the research they need to be on top technically.
At least, J.Carmack and M.Abrash explain very well the various technical problems and solutions on their blogs and papers.
Also, I vastly prefer Facebook dumping money on this than on computer vision and drones.

I suppose that on the occulus forum, some people are probably too pationnate about trademarks (like apple-fan or linux-fan might be sometimes). It's not like they became ill or gone broke, nothing tragic or great happened, really.
Give your love to people, not trademarks ! :D
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by Klaim »

For some reason I think it would have been less shocking and scary if it was google buying it. I mean, we know their direction more or less and they hurt less communities than Facebook does.
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by iblues1976 »

Kojack wrote:*Sigh*

Reading this on the train to work is not the best way to start a day of assignment marking.

The oculus forums have exploded, there's a battle between two kinds of people:
- people saying they want to cancel their DK2 order, or saying they wouldn't have ordered if this news came out being orders opened.
- people fanatically white knighting oculus and insulting anybody that doesn't act like this is the greatest news ever.

I have a boycott list I follow fairly strictly:
- any restaurant that serves cuttlefish (they are very intelligent. kittens of the sea)
- gloria jean coffee (provided funding to an anti gay rights lobby group and the co-founder ran a support group that cured lesbianism using demonic exorcisms).
- local hotdog place (owner tweeted that he tells customers to f*** off if they have a complaint)
- hungry jacks in the queen street mall (manager was rude to me 7 years ago)
- facebook

I guess oculus will be an exception now, I've already spent over $900 on them. But if something better comes along, I'm jumping ship. I'm also going to feel icky doing anything with it now.

Notch has stated that he's cancelled plans for official Oculus support in Minecraft due to this deal.

On the bright side... oculus get more cash to develop stuff, so might have more weight to make deals with parts makers like samsung.

I'm still hoping this is just an april fools joke that was released too early.

(This forum has a good history of being professional, so let's keep things more sensible here than the oculus forums are at the moment).
Well, I'm not that strict when it comes to facebook, but the only reason I haven't deleted is because I still want to see pictures that my family post (excuses!!!)

Anyways, I read the news... We have one. I'm planning to buy the KIT 2. I was very sad by the news too. I'm not sure what facebook is going to do...

Maybe, I will have friend people with oclus rift now? LOL
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by Kojack »

Microsoft buying it would have made more sense, as a way to compete with Sony's VR headset.

Or Unity buying them. Unity seems to be adding every commercial middleware there is and most third party Oculus dev is done in it.

Of course being offered $2 billion is something very hard to turn down. If Facebook keeps a completely hands off approach, then this could be awesome. This deal is also massive publicity, people who have never heard of the rift are talking about the new facebook virtual reality thing. More funding means better hardware. More users means more games companies make content. As much as I hate facebook, there's a lot of positives to the deal.

But on the other hand, Facebook has a history of shutting down things they buy. Zuckerberg has said: "We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people".
Facebook is a public company with shareholders. Unless this deal has some very strict conditions to maintain autonomy, what the shareholders of facebook say is what oculus will have to do. No matter what Palmer says, he now has to answer to higher ups who are primarily concerned with profit.

I'm not looking for social VR where all my friends meet me and we chat. I don't want to browse the internet first person like in Futurama ("My god, it's full of ads!"). I want VR for gaming. But not even all gaming, just some gaming. Simulators, exploration games, things like that. Maybe first person shooters will be ok with Stem or Priovr (I've got both on order). Fighting zombies in a priovr version of dayz would be awesome, although running into the crazy bandits would be far more disturbing. :)

My main concerns with the deal:
- I don't like facebook, anything they touch is tainted to me. Kind of like when I found out Beck was a scientologist, I never listened to his songs again.
- Oculus currently have a complicated login system (need a dev site account to get the sdk, and the forum won't remember passwords, needing them to be entered manually). Will it switch to needing a facebook login to get the sdk?
- Will discussions / forum / news move to facebook? Carmack tweeted: "I suppose I will get a FB account now, so that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length...".


[youtube]UAVQLM7Jf_4[/youtube]

Hey Cybereality, you should come hang around here for a while to escape the chaos. We're still friendly! We won't even ask about the deal.
:)
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by iblues1976 »

They said you will not need facebook login...

I do agree with you.. we will see...

For example, Bumptop was purchased by google... and they stop.. at least doing that... maybe they are doing something internal, adding some stuff for android... who knows...

It seems to me, that they are desperate. We all know that facebook by itself is not a long term proposition. So, let's buy all the companies we can... maybe one will be great! However, some investors (as I heard in NPR) were not happy with the purchase.

They also purchased whats app.... that made a bit more sense...

However, I think Oculus Rift is great... I haven't check the ones from Sony... have you tried them?
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Re: Facebook buys out Oculus VR for $2 billion

Post by iblues1976 »

I will still try to get dev kit 2 for now.

It is interesting if you go to reddit... people are boiling...

I think is unfair for the people that gave them over 2 million dollars to start. What do this people get?

While not well known, there is a company called gesture works. Gets goverment money to produce open source software for multi-touch gestures...(in action script) ... anyways, at some point, they stop releasing the source code.. and they had a commercial product in parallel (same software)

Then, the new version, which they do give for free (the action script, the c++ you have to pay for), they tell me that it is entirely new code... yeah right...
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