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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.
I don't care about Facebook or the oculus rift, but the shitstorm that is about to drop will be worth a watch!
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
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?
Dear editors, April Fools is next week.
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
...sort of works for Facebook now? Bet he didn't see that coming.
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
Finally, someone made money from VR! ;-)
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.
At least Oculus have shipped a lot of dev kits - they were well built and went out to a lot of external developers.
Then there's the 2nd dev kit, which is nearing a finished product and shipping soon to even more people.
It's a far cry from the vapor-wear (ha!) that Sony has currently...
Besides, if they HAD a finished product Facebook would have paid more like $24 billion (see: WhatsApp). :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Facebook purchased Instagram for 1B, Oculus for 2B, and WhatsApp for 19B. Mystery to me where those numbers come from.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well then he's grossly mistaken about the true purpose of the Internet!
I thought the true purpose of the internet was porn.
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
This ./ article from 1999 has Carmack talking about Snow Crash:
Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired.
It is almost painful for me to watch some of the VRML initiatives. It just seems so obviously the wrong way to do something. All of this debating, committee forming, and spec writing, and in the end, there isn't anything to show for it. Make something really cool first, and worry about the spec after you are sure it's worth it!
I do think it is finally the right time for this to start happening for real. While a lot of people could envision the possibilities after seeing DOOM or Quake, it is really only now that we have general purpose hardware acceleration that things are actually flexible enough to be used as a creative medium without constantly being conscious of the technical limitations.
The Metaverse of the Snow Crash world was basically an epic social virtual reality experience. I've always figured Carmack would be involved in making that a reality somehow, and the Oculus Rift certainly seems like it could be a critical part. Facebook actually makes sense from a social perspective as well.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people terrified because of imagined privacy implications, but I'm still fascinated to see where this ride takes us.
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!
Wow. John Carmack quit his job at iD (Zenimax) to be the CTO at Occulus Rift and then in less than six months is probably getting a few dozen millions of dollars.
Talk about knowing where to be at the right time....
Same with Marc Andreesen and his VC cash infusion of $75 million just a few months ago. Those guys are going to turn that $75 mill into a bunch more through this turn and burn deal. Not so much a 'burn,' but it is a very quick harvesting on their investment.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Hey, maybe Facebook will acquire the badly needed "Frag" option alongside "Like".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And Notch has already cancelled his Oculus Rift deal because Facebook creeps him out.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Palmer Luckey explains what this means on Reddit.
A few samples:
"I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift."
"It it enough to bring a consumer product to market, but not the consumer product we really wish we could ship. This deal is going to immediately accelerate a lot of plans that were languishing on our wishlist, and the resulting hardware will be better AND cheaper. We have the resources to create custom hardware now, not just rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. There is a lot of good news on the way that is not yet public, so believe me, things will become a lot more clear over time."
"Sure, we could have made more money down the road, but this deal was not about making the most money. It was about doing the best thing for the long term future of virtual reality.
This lets us make CV1 everything we want it to be, which is going to drive much larger sales and adoption."
"I won't change, and any change at Oculus will be for the better. We have even more freedom than we had under our investment partners because Facebook is making a long term play on the success of VR, not short-term returns.
A lot of people are upset, and I get that. If you feel the same way a year from now, I would be very surprised."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
https://support.oculusvr.com/h...
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