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Zuckerberg buying Oculus VR

Anonymous
Not applicable
Guys, this is really huge: Facebook is buying Oculus:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/25/5547456/facebook-buying-oculus-for-2-billion

I am really surprised by this new, since it is quite a different market (or not?).

Anyway, huge CONGRATS to the Oculus Team!
396 REPLIES 396

DieKatzchen
Honored Guest
The way I see it, facebook wants to be the Metaverse, so that they can stay relevant. But first VR needs to be successful, and it needs to be successful /fast/, before facebook implodes on itself. So they're investing in infrastructure. Plain and simple. Maybe in a decade they'll look at Oculus and say "how can we leverage our investment into ad revenue?" but I won't care in a decade. By that time there will be any number of competitors that I can switch to.

Also, CV1 will almost certainly be open simply because the fundamental design of the current hardware forces it to be. They've already revealed so much of the secret sauce that they would have to start over from scratch to lock it down in any appreciable way. facebook may have a history of questionable ethics, but they wouldn't throw away all the research that they basically just paid for, just to generate bad PR.

Sawersadam
Honored Guest
"DieKatzchen" wrote:
The way I see it, facebook wants to be the Metaverse
Spot on in my view and they bring scale. Oculus gaming is exciting, Metaverse more so.

Darcanis
Adventurer
People afraid of change and the unknown:

Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!

Me as a developer and objective observer of technology:

Hummm I wonder how this will help with multiplayer and integrated social interaction within my future games and projects? Now I might not have to build my own services to provide those features!

This means a larger audience for my creations.

Adoption of the technology should be 100,000x what it would have been meaning bringing my product to potentially over a billion new customers! This equals a bigger return on my investment! *Cha-ching!*

This means they can have custom screen and other parts made cheaper instead of waiting for castoffs from the cell phone market! This means better and cheaper screens and cheaper product!

If the screw it up somehow down the line (which I doubt) I’ll just swap out the SDK for a different VR solution like PS4, Xbox One, Valve, etc… Either way Oculus kickstarted the whole VR revolution and it will be the next big thing.

No matter how you look at it VR was always going to be a big part of Social Networks in the future as well as gaming and entertainment. This isn’t a huge surprise and done properly will only serve to make VR better due to the huge warchest they now have for development and production.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Facebook buying the Oculus Rift! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!

Edudjr
Honored Guest
"owenwp" wrote:
"vin" wrote:
"Edudjr" wrote:
My point is: facebook doesn't force you to install any kind of apps, it doesn't force you to share things. Why would they do this now?


That's not entirely true. When you go to most sites, they will automatically load a Like button that tracks you regardless of if you have a Facebook account or not, and report your usage history to Facebook. They've been forcing their reporting structure on you as a user without your consent for years now.


No, they don't force that on anyone. The website developer has to go out of their way to put like buttons on their pages, and they do it because their users want them to. Are you planning to put like buttons in your games? Because Oculus doesn't need to be in any way involved with FB for you to do so, you could do it right now.


Exactly. Also, the like button itself doesn't "track" anyone, unless you are logged to facebook and click on it.

Edudjr
Honored Guest
Totally agree with Solstice.

FengShuiEngine
Honored Guest
Facebook owns Instagram. I found that out today and had no idea before. They've owned it for 2 years so far and you wouldn't be able to tell from visiting that website; there's no Facebook branding anywhere and you don't need a Facebook account to make an Instagram account. It's just a completely separate entity. I've yet to see Facebook branding anywhere in Whatsapp either. You know the only place I've seen tons of Facebook branding, Facebook adverts and compulsory Facebook logins? Facebook.

Say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg, but he's not an idiot. He's a smart business man and is not about to piss $2 billion down the drain by making poor business decisions. Facebook has ads plastered all over it because it's a free service. Ad revenue is how Facebook makes money (primarily). People will be spending roughly $300 on Oculus Rift kits. Since when is it smart business to make people pay for ads?

Because of this news, millions of people who had no idea what Oculus Rift was are now aware of its existence. With that much exposure and the potential of making even more un-godly sums of money, they aren't just going to start idly yanking their dicks around. They already have proven prototypes and now they have the resources to manufacture cost-effective custom hardware, rather than scavenging for parts as they were originally doing. Had FB not acquired Oculus, I believe that the consumer version would've had a similar spec to the DK2. Palmer Lucky said on Reddit how part of the deal was to allow them to produce higher spec/quality hardware at a lower cost. The hardware will definitely benefit from this deal.

People believe that because of this deal, Oculus have lost all creative control. That isn't necessarily the case. Oculus wouldn't have gone into this thing blind, they would have (or should have, rather) set up contractual terms to retain creative control and prevent the company from being torn apart. Remember, Oculus didn't need to be acquired; the company wasn't in financial trouble and interest in the Oculus Rift and VR was growing by the day. Profit forecasts for the company would've likely shown very favourably. The ball was, therefore, in Oculus's court. Zuckerberg wanted a piece of the VR pie and needed to appease them, not the other way around. Yes, $2 billion will go a long way, but I believe $2 billion could have easily been made by Oculus within a few years. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they didn't just pay George Lucas $4 billion and call it a day. The agreement included terms to protect the brand George had spent decades of his life building and allow him to be part of the future creative process to a certain degree. It's called contractual negotiations for a reason; it's never a completely one sided affair.

I'm not saying this doesn't have the potential to go completely tits up, but there are certainly aspects about this deal to be optimistic about.

goettel
Explorer
It seems clear that a lot of people whining about this haven't read any of the responses by Palmer, Carmack et al. Try to substitute short-sighted conjecture with actual READING, and do try to recognize that being self-entitled, hate-filled and confused little whiners just makes you look foolish.

-Please- by all means cancel any pre-order you made, others are waiting in line to take advantage of your small-mindedness.

And no I'm not talking about people having well reasoned concerns over all this, I'm one of them. Just chill out and give the Oculus guys a chance to show us all whether this is the right way forward. If you can't muster that, at least show some respect - or at the very least stop acting like pricks. Geez... :roll:

SnazzyD
Honored Guest
http://news.yahoo.com/100-million-worth-ads-headed-instagram-feed-030029297.html

I'm sorry - what were you saying about Instagram not being touched? I couldn't hear for all the millions of ads headed its way...

Solstice
Honored Guest
Still...it's pretty much impossible to force EA, Ubisoft, Konami, Indie Devs, insert video game company here to put Facebook Ads into their games. They just wouldn't release the game on that platform if they had to put ads everywhere, which would kill the platform, which in the end would cost Facebook money.

It is however possible, as i wrote on the page before, that there will be a Facebook - Second life Style, or something like a VR chat from Facebook itself. VR Aps from Facebook.
And yeah...i am fine with ads on these platforms...doesn't bother me nor will it influence the games i will be playing with the rift.

SonyWinsVR
Honored Guest
"SnazzyD" wrote:
http://news.yahoo.com/100-million-worth-ads-headed-instagram-feed-030029297.html

I'm sorry - what were you saying about Instagram not being touched? I couldn't hear for all the millions of ads headed its way...


It's how things always start. A company will buy a product/company and say oh nothing is going to change. A year later is when the change slowly starts to creep up down the road.