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Minecraft Creator Halts Plans For Oculus Version Following Facebook Acquisition
An anonymous reader writes "Not one hour after the announcement of the the acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook yesterday, Markus 'Notch' Persson has announced that he has ceased all discussions about bringing it to Oculus Rift. 'I don't want to work with social, I want to work with games. ... Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.' Persson has stated that he made this decision despite initially investing $10,000 in Oculus' Kickstarter."
Facebook just hasn't thrown enough money at him yet.
When they do...then we'll see.
Minecraft isn't making the social side, its userbase is. That's why the myriad videos of let's-play are on youtube, the streaming sessions are on Twitch and announced on twitter, etc. and not on some huge (and bloated) "social network" service hosted on minecraft.net
Maybe we deserve this world ?
From the Oculus VR Forums (which you should really read some of to get a better balanced view of how the actual developers feel).
spire8989 writes:
"Hi, I'm a developer and am very happy with this news. Also, Markus is a pretty well-known hipster, this is very expected from him. For someone who seems so anti-Facebook he should really stop having an active Facebook account that he constantly updates though. If you actually read this article you'll see where he says that this will have a positive impact on social VR experiences, but he doesn't want to work with them "because he doesn't know their intentions".
I guess you get to be picky and complain when you have an extremely popular game."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One thing to realize is that Notch really never had any plans of making a VR port of Minecraft. In the past, he has stated that because of the JAVA technology used in Minecraft, it was too difficult to do it right, and they were having a problem making the UI work. They weren't very thrilled with the way the Minecrift mod did it, and wanted to do it better, but it just wasn't possible.
(In fact, the Minecrift mod doesn't even work with anything higher than 1.6, which means you can only use it in singleplayer or on servers that never upgraded. This is because of how much things have changed in the code between 1.6 and 1.7.)
So, Notch actually abandoned the effort sometime last year.
Last year: "We aren't making a Rift port because it's just too difficult with our current codebase."
Yesterday: "We aren't making a Rift port because Facebook."
To me, it sounds like a convenient excuse to cover up the fact that their codebase is really messy and can't do as much as they wish it could. We can blame it on Zuck now!
You seem to be operating under the assumption facebook will continue to develop the oculus rift as intended and is not buying it simply to obtain some piece of IP they want to bastardize and use in some way to monetize its existing user base further.
I strongly suspect the only oculus rift gaming devices to ever see market, are the ones that are already in the hands of developers and kickstarter backers we should expect this to more likely appear in some other form of social tool that in no way appeals to the original audience of oculus
I'm not the only one. If you read the founders Reddit posts they also appear to be under that assumption. Also, what possible IP could facebook want from Oculus that would be worth that much to them? That just does not make sense. They are not buying a user base, like with What'sApp. Aquiri-hire also doesn't make any sense here. They bought a hardware company. They (Oculus) is already saying that they are planning to start work on custom hardware components (versus being tied to off-the-shelf parts for mobile phones), and part of the deal terms was to allow them to lower the final cost of the consumer hardware. The more likely explanation is that they (Facebook) want to branch out into an emerging tech. I don't see it any differently than Microsoft developing the XBox. Just because they are a social company doesn't mean that's ALL they can do. It would be smart of Zuck to branch out. He, like the rest of the world, has to know that social platforms have a shelf life and if Facebook wants to survive they need to start doing other things.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Of course he's not. He's probably locked in for 3 years as a term of the sale.
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If you want to see the future of the internet, go read Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. All these guys did - Carmack, Zuck, the Google guys - whatever, and they've all been trying to make Stephenson's Metaverse come to life ever since. Think of it as a kind of Burnham plan for the internet.
Facebook is trying to produce the Metaverse, just like everyone before them, and the Oculus Rift will be the first incarnation of the Metaverse's headset.