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Facebook Buying Oculus VR For $2 Billion
Several readers sent word that Facebook will acquire Oculus VR for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg says the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures." The obvious question is: why Facebook would buy a company focused on VR gaming? The Oculus team says, "But when you consider it more carefully, we're culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step. ... It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR." Put more simply: money and connections.
Fuck Zuck
Too bad. Through my use of the Rift, facebook will find a way to monetize me and what I do beyond the purchase price of the Rift. That's what they do; I can't see Facebook's culture changing anytime soon. Nope.
Thousands of people just watched a twenty-something make two billion dollars with their money.
Remember the Futurama version of the internet. Lets go for a walk around Facebook in Virtual Reality...
No thanks.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
If Zuck thinks the future of Oculus is about connecting and talking with people in virtual... And NOT firing rocket launchers at them.... Well then he's grossly mistaken about the true purpose of the Internet!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"But when you consider it more carefully, we're culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; ... It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR."
If you find yourself saying things like this or speaking in this style you should probably just kill yourself because there's no hope left for you as a human being. God damn what an abuse of language.
worse: Comcast
better: Samsung, other lcd vendors, going public as its own stock
same: Apple, Sony, Valve, Microsoft, Disney
Way to throw your early adopters under the bus.
So, who wants to bet whether or not the basic Oculus Rift will be permanently tied-into the Facebook ecosystem somehow?
Maybe some "cloud" features (required to access support forums, firmware updates, online configuration page, etc) that will be tied to your Facebook account -- none of which will make much sense, but somehow it will get shoe-horned in there.
Facebook purchased Instagram for 1B, Oculus for 2B, and WhatsApp for 19B. Mystery to me where those numbers come from.
By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures."
We need some PR-friendly slang for this new kind of interaction. I propose that we call it "going outside". There could be entire phone apps devoted to "calling" your friends and arranging to "meet" them somewhere...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I was moments away from buying Oculus' 2nd gen SDK just to play with the thing. It could have been a blast.
But now that they've been assimilated by the Borg, Oculus VR has been mortally poisoned. What a shame.
1). So people donated $2.5 million to start up a company that sold for $2 billion, and they don't see a dime of that.
2). Worse, they have no control over the company, so Facebook now gets to lock down the use of the technology to only big developers that can afford to license it rather than being open to hobbyists the way many of the backers were not doubt had hoped.
3). Oh, and a "next generation" version that is completely incompatible with the current one is now doubt on the way. Since your old generation version won't be available anymore, good luck getting any developers to support it.
Knutsi- I agree with all your points, but wanted to extend your comment a bit.
Probably that last line is the most significant motivator for both parties--
For Oculus, Sony was raising a threat. Also, supply of displays from Samsung might prove to be an unfeasible constraint. Especially if Samsung decides to create their own VR googles. With FaceBook money, they can build their own OLED factory if need be.
For FaceBook, they have to really worry that a technology on the horizon might take their hundreds of millions of eyeballs off FaceBook html and point them in a different direction- just like FaceBook took eyes away from network television. They just bought what might have been a FaceBook killer in the future. Maybe they aren't planning to weld Oculus rift onto the FaceBook homepage. Maybe they'll let it crush facebook, but they won't care because they'll be riding on top of the beast that stomped it to death.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
No. This is worse, way worse. While Microsoft has difficulty in executing things, they still maintain a basic respect for their customers. Facebook on the other hand has demonstrated time and again their absolute lack of scruples and moral integrity when it comes to monetizing their users.
This saddens and depresses me. I had such optimistic hope for Oculus.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Except that Sony has working demo units, exactly the same thing as Oculus VR.
A company branching out into tangentially related fields? It's like when that fruit-themed computer company decided to get into the record business. That sure didn't go anywhere, did it? Or when they decided they were going to try their hand at making telephones, what a lark!
I'm not a fan of Facebook, but I think this is a good partnership for both parties, as well as consumers.
The Aquateen Hunger Force episode "eDork" comes to mind...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'll wait and see, but yeah, my interest in the Rift just took a nose-dive as well. A damned shame, it's the first really interesting thing to happen to gaming in a decade or so. Now it looks like we'll have our choice of selling our souls to our choice of Sony or Facebook if we want to play.
Maybe this is God's way of telling us VR is a bad idea?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
2 billion seems like a lot of money to sink into a gaming headset....Think more about where you could go from where the product is now, and think that other companies are doing that is similar.
*COUGH**COUGH* GOOGLE GLASS
Facebook wants to compete with Google. They think Glass is the next iPad, and are trying to get in the game.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'll admit I checked the date more than once..
>exactly the same thing as Oculus VR.
Only in the sense that they're both VR helmets. IIRC the Sony demo models featured more lag, considerably lower resolution head tracking, and a much inferior screen technology. Meanwhile the Rift folks were suggesting that the final hardware had been selected and they were simply waiting on the component hardware market to make it available to them, with the planned commercial unit having dramatically better screen resolution and less lag than even the second developer kit.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wait, you think whiny slashdotters are an economic force?
Notch has already canceled his plans to bring Minecraft to the Rift. Given that the entire success of the Rift so far has been from the community (literally: the Rift was crowd-funded and would not exist today if it wasn't for the community), and I have yet to see a single person in the community comments on a number of sites who doesn't dislike this move, I'm guessing the blowback is going to be pretty massive.
I myself have already gone from debating whether I should pick up the dev kit version 2 to play around with or wait for the consumer version, to not planning on buying it ever, and I'm not the only one.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
No doubt this purchase is not all cash-- probably mainly stock. When your stock is trading at a P/E of 106 then trading 2Billion of your stock to buy another company seems reasonable. It's like buying it with moldy turnips at the fresh turnip price.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.