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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."
Cool story notch.
Anyone that pays someone to make money with no expectations in return is a fool.
A mere millionaire daring to defy a billionaire? Now I have seen everything.
"We can't hear you through all of the cash."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The ownership by Facebook of any technology immediately puts the taint of a rich douchebag who wants to monetize everything, invade your privacy, and sell your information.
Fuck the Zuck.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Some of these people - I don't get the way they think. This seems to be the same type of thing you get in various communities (Linux certainly included) where people want to pick up their toys and go home if every last thing isn't "their way". Who cares who owns the tech? What a doofus.
Facebook just hasn't thrown enough money at him yet.
When they do...then we'll see.
This was a wise move, and really the only way forward. Oculus now comes with the most obvious trojan in history.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Facebook might not be a games company right now, but the acquisition of Oculus certainly gives them a huge opportunity to venture in to that market. And as far as Minecraft not being social... are you kidding me? It might be a malicious kind of social, but Persson's pull out is coming off as more of a flounce rather than an educated decision.
Good for him. I'm not particularly happy about this deal either. Facebook is going to mangle everything the OR was supposed to be.
..notch hasn't done anything since giving minecraft over to his dev team. This is just a lame excuse to get out of doing anything. Also kind of a jerk to shit on someone that wants money to fund their project when that ass is rolling in billions and doing jack shit.
I think that's a bit short-sighted given that this technology from the get-go has nothing to do with social media. Yes it has other applications but it's primarily for games and is a separate company entity than Facebook. I believe Zuckerberg is just making a smart investment in a known future of gaming.
Brusk and Gifted Independent Developer who Stuck Gold voices his frustration with a major commercial acquisition that the whole tech-concerned internet is on its toes over.
Brusk and Gifted Independent Developer who Stuck Oil tells Oculus that they won't be getting Minecraft for Christmas this year because they made a naughty capitalist decision which advances the looming surveillance state of developed nations.
Brusk and Gifted Independent Developer who Discovered Atlantis is known for having strong and pessimistic views of the game industry which -- surprise! -- strongly favor grassroots development.
I don't see how the complaints of Brusk and Gifted Independent Developer who Developed Minecraft and then Passed it on to an Equally Gifted Development Team add anything more to the Oculus conversation than the thoughts of any other half-informed follower of recently-emerging VR technologies.
"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."
It? WHAT is 'it'?
Is software development speak for: "literally no work has been done".
Why is this news worthy?
I'm glad to see that I won't be seeing "See what your friends are building in Minecraft. Connect your Facebook account today!" plastered all over Minecraft anytime soon.
(Incidentally, f*ck you, Netflix.)
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
Thing is, quite honestly, I see this as using any excuse to not do work, something Notch is very well known to do ALL THE FUCKING TIME.
"Hey Notch, we love that space game you are making, cannot wait to play it, those new features sound great!"
"Yeeeaaah, cancelling my space game, people like it too much.... VACATIONS"
Is there any excuses he HASN'T used over the years?
I'd care if it was someone of worth, but someone that got lucky with a block-building game who sits on a pile of cash doing nothing, I literally could not care less. /v/, his game would be nothing. (and before some tard comes out and says "b-b-b-but youtube!", there was not a single person playing the game at the time, this was WELL before that time, way before the game was even known, youtube-craft is the last and most recent boom in sales, but I am speaking the first) /v/ would no longer suck his dick.
If it wasn't for those interviews or 4chan
He used to update the game so much back then. Adding features all the time, one by one.
Sudden increase in sales, makes a company, less updates, which was understandable at the time, he needed time to solidify the company. Then time went on. And on. And on. And still none of what he planned got released. Then he ditched the game entirely and threw it at Jeb to pick up the shattered community because
What's that noise I hear? Oh my, the sudden rush of the Notch Defence Force.
And on that note, I still play the game, modded only, vanilla is awful. I've even co-run a server for years now, which went through various different modpacks, most recently Hexxit. So much for that Mod API. They should have just let Bukkit have full fucking control of the thing instead of having to write a new damn API.
Occulus was doomed from the moment it was announced.
It's just the most recent version of "virtual reality hype" (which started with VRML in 1996), which is guaranteed to attract stupid money, which is guaranteed to ruin everything it buys.
Facebook is a volcano of stupid money. It flows like lava, and destroys everything it touches. The only way to avoid it is to not live near the volcano.
Carmack (the fact you can't spell him name right ames me dubious you understand his intent) said this on Twitter:
I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.
If you want to understand what he means, read Ready Player One.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
it was either lots of gamers (including me) longing for buying their hardware, or selling out and get rich fast - now they won't have as much work in front of them either, because no one will want to buy a rift any more. thanks fuckerberg.
The Occulus Mod for Minecraft is pretty flawless. This changes nothing.
The companies you work with say a lot about your priorities.
Exactly, and Facebook is now working with Oculus...
Why can't you think about it THAT way? It means the same thing as what you are saying. Why can't Facebook be changing course? WhatsApp and Oculus purchases make MORE sense if that is the case, not less.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Notch sold minecraft to work on other things he is not the one working on it anymore.
Every now and then I buy a humble bundle for a few bucks that I never get to play, but it seemed like god cause at the moment. Anyway it's about what I get paid for working 4-5minutes so I really don't care.
$10'000 is the same for Notch. He can give it away for fun, if it's for a good cause even if he don't beleve it will work so why not?
There was Microsoft as The Borg, but the 1990s ended and the tech industry sort of forgot all about them (is Microsoft still around?). After that, it was Oracle going around trying to destroy technologies by buying them. They mostly succeeded with Java but somehow ZFS escaped. Now begin the Facebook dark ages. What techs are we talking about today, which must not be allowed to emerge?
Oculus isn't the only VR headset. They may be the current best (I don't actually know). At least conceptually, the inputs and outputs are reasonably understood. So what makes it hard for an application that supports the Oculus headset to support others?
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Carmack works on what he finds interesting. Right now VR is something that he is really passionate about. This deal almost gives him infinite resources to do that work. He doesn't need the money or the job and he will stay exactly as long as he is interested in the tech. I think he cares little how the tech is used just as long as he in on the cutting edge of developing it.
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!
I hope they discontinue production of Valkyrie i know more than a few eveonline payers that were very excited for this game but now want nothing to do with it, some have already suspended their eve accounts in protest.
The Oculus Rift was an amazing design and the first practical and affordable VR tool to come out of the woodwork in a long time. Sad it has come to this. Especially sad for the Kickstarter supporters. That being said, I'm sure that much has been learned along the way. I suspect the creative people will soon drift away and, hopefully now flush with cash, can take the next step and do something even more amazing and build on what they now know. How about a 180 degree horizontal/90 degree vertical field of view in something much smaller and lighter? I remember putting on a LEEPsystems headset back in the late 1980's and the immersion was stunning because of that - anything less is like wearing blinders. I don't remember the actual specs but the field of view was around that, I'll have to dig it out - I'm sure I still have some of their old tech papers. I remember it stated that if you can see the frame around the display then it's not really virtual reality. They even had a demo film camera and viewer to show off the optics (they had to use CRT's back then and only film could show off the possible detail). It wasn't so lightweight but their lens design did the trick and seems to have disappeared into the past. The other thing they did was put most of the resolution in the center with less detail out toward the edges so that the apparent resolution was much greater than the actual. A redesign of that concept with modern displays and trackers, maybe tracking eye movements to move the resolution to where it would matter would be a huge next step.
His loss, the need will be taken by someone else in this very competitive environment. VR is coming, and playing the ostrich will only limit the bird, not the environment.
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
So what makes it hard for an application that supports the Oculus headset to support others?
You can easily provide a similar 3D view across multiple headsets.
What makes it hard to deliver the same application is all of the hardware that gets added to do tracking really well and keep latency very low. The 2nd dev kit has some advanced positional tracking hardware to help keep the view in sync with what the users head is doing, and also (perhaps just as important) built-in hardware to be able to test latency.
If you don't do all of those things, the user can get very sick, very fast. That's what makes VR so hard, is that there is very little difference between "amazing" and "OMG SO SICK YAK". So more than jet putting up to stereoscopic screens you have to do a ton of testing and hardware specific tuning.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well I want to decide for myself what to plug my goggles into
That is EXACTLY what Oculus was trying to do. The current dev kits work on OSX and Windows, iOS/Android support is also planned...
There's no reason to think any different is true under Facebook. In fact if you think about it, almost no other company would be as likely to keep the device cross-platform as Facebook - certainly Google and Apple would have each dragged it back to their respective lairs to horde.
You are monitored at every step. And now that's the future of VR.
Only large multi-person VR worlds, there will be plenty of stand-alone content where you are not "monitored".
But there was ALWAYS a big server component of any VR future to make really interesting worlds where you interacted with others. That's not coming from Facebook, that's just a natural progression and something science fiction has been predicting for decades.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've known a couple faculty researchers - absolutely brilliant guys - who were abysmal spellers...It's also worth noting you had your own spelling and grammar issues
I knew some asshole would whine about pointing out a pretty egregious spelling error (the FIRST LETTER of a name? Really?).
So I wondered if such a person would be so hypocritical as to complain about errors in a post where they complained about people who complain about said errors in a post...
Turns out the answer is yes. Experiment complete.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Poor John Carmack... You tried to pull a Michael Jordan but perhaps it's time to go back and work on id Tech.
I've already got enough Creepers as "friends" on Facebook...
Oculus served their purpose; there will be good competition now. I suppose the donors got their "money's worth" in that regard.
At the same time, this serves as a reminder of the varying motives of entrepreneurs, irregardless of their skills or strengths or vision. The difference between, say, Elon Musk, and the founder of Oculus, are astounding. One is motivated to see the technology to its end, the other is motivated by money- pure and simple.
I'm no longer inspired by Kickstarter. I don't like how a small group of people can cash out on humanity's dime. I don't like how people who are clearly motivated by greed, no matter how exceptional they are, can deceive us and give companies like Facebook the last laugh. The founder should be proud of his achievements, but should also be ashamed of what has transpired. People on Kickstarter donated based on a charter, encompassing a vision and the expectation is to see it carried out to the end with effort and dignity. That means continue until you have achieved your charter, ie release a consumer version. From there, I don't really care- sell out, although if the this whole process of crowd-sourcing made sense, the intellectual property would be open and not privately sold. Kickstarter often serves to manipulate passionate, good-natured people who buy into a vision.
I propose no solution for Kickstarter, but I will be more mindful of the for-profit ventures there, if I even use it again at all. I didn't donate to support an intrusive, unethical company founded entirely on shareholder equity from an over-valued IPO build its portfolio and devour promising technology. In this regard, Kickstarter is yet another way for large companies to take advantage of the natural, incredible output of human ingenuity found outside their organization with no effort. In fact, other people paid for it. Thus I am completely on the side of Markus Persson.
Oculus served their purpose; there will be good competition now. I suppose the donors got their "money's worth" in that regard.
BULLSHIT
The kickstarters were ripped off. Simple like that.
They take the risks by using their money funding an idea. Now Facebook buys for themselves a successful product, and the kickstarters aren't getting any reward from that. Not a single one had agreed on a "Facebook Oculus".
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Agreed. I'm just trying to recognize that many, many Kickstarter projects fail horribly. They succeeded beyond reasonable measures. The interest in VR has grown dramatically and has prompted a new look at the space.
I'm glad that happened, so what I am trying to say is I do not regret Oculus VR existing through kickstarter.
But I am not pleased to have been deceived, and I am sad to witness base human nature triumph over passion for innovation and technology. Could they not have taken the moral high ground, at least for a little longer? Finish what you promised, go as long as you can, if you are going to lose- and only then- sell out? I was so inspired by Oculus and their activism (I attended their convention in Boston). This decision has caused me to bounce back to reality- greed usually wins.
He approaches a group of cool kids hanging out, flashes his cash, and most of them ditch him at the first opportunity. He still buys a lot of friends, though he knows it's not real friendship in the back of his mind.
It's not investing when you contribute to a Kickstarter project. It's giving.
uh, the kickstarters didn't buy stock, they donated money. they got exactly what they payed for.
to be rich and successful enough to have principles to fall back on.
It's always good to see people stand on principles, but it's just a lot harder to ignore the money on the table when you need it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Why is facebook and minecraft touted so much on the internet? First of all, facebook is a bloated, grotesque, banal mess of buttons and espionage. Minecraft is a sorry excuse for a game (the survival mode). The only good that comes from minecraft are the mods, which are all fractured, poorly compatible, and in the end break the "game" even more. Really only creative mode is useful... In the end even nerds are succumbing to the madness of celebrity. It's a sad, sad, time.
Jesus Christ, there is WAY too many fucking drama queens speaking up about this issue. If you feel emotion, step back and look at the issue when you're a bit calmer.
Just saying.
@notch fails at life and would have halted development due to being slightly cumbersome in the near future anyway, just like he did with all the other promised features.
-RIP minecraft alpha.
http://www.vrase.com/ via armdevices.net
on the other hand my eyes never recovered from being forced to use a mantis magnifying scope.
So the PE ratio on Facebook stock is 90. It's ludicrous.
I saw someone on Ars rhetorically ask, essentially,"Well, why in the world would facebook want to mess with Oculus!?" and a reply seemed better served here:
When this tech bubble finally goes floomph and pops, FB isn't going to have much of anything; I really hope a lot of you remember when this was all going on 15 years ago, because it seems to be happening again. Tiny companies with virtually no real earnings are putting out enormous IPOs. When FB crashes, they're going to panic and try to monetize the hell out of Oculus.
I suspect that it will either get raped for the IP or spun off after the tech crash.
For all the hoopla, I feel liek people swimming in money is clouding their ability to think rationally about this. Prove me wrong, internet, but I think Palmer Luckey just made the classic blunder (besides starting a land war in Asia): Never go in against a clueless techie-hipster billionaire douchebag when a game-changing technology is on the line.
-
Anyone who is around Mark Z should watch their pets. The guy wants to make animals available for sexual deviants to be able to be abuse. "Will curb other desires". He's a sicko! Good for minecraft.
So they (or you if appropriate) invested in some random group of people you never met, have no track record to look at, because you found a website that let you throw money at them ... and they told you how they were going to make something awesome. You didn't bother to do any due diligence background work on your own and instead basically gave money away to the Nigerian prince.
You pretty much deserved it.
But you didn't get ripped off and thats not what happened.
Did the original kick starters get what they paid for? (Dev units I expect?) If so, how did they get ripped off?
Kickstarter is not an investment website, its a donation website. Not really sure how they got ripped off other than you don't like Facebook (me either!)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Minecraft is cool and all, but its not THAT cool.
And really, nobody gives a shit what you're opinion is.
And you're a fucking hypocrite who has no problem boycotting random things while fully participating in the same thing by a different name; i.e. no Windows 8 RT mind craft because OMG LOCKDOWN@#^!@#$^&Q! yet you have absolutely no problem selling it for $20 a pop for Xbox360.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Regardless of what you use to sense position, you're going to have to put it into an input at some point.
Only if it works. The Sony VR headset has head tracking too - but how well does it work? They aren't even shipping dev kits until June - at least that's when they claim they will be shipping.
VR is just too big, and really too old and mature, to be controlled by one company.
How is it big, or old and mature in any way?
There are not even ANY products for sale at the moment. There have been brief flashes where some stuff was put out, but then the fire cooled again and there were long spells of nothing...
I would say real VR is totally in its infancy, with almost no real rules figured out for what works especially well or what people really want or will enjoy.
I'm not saying it's not possible to re-use a lot of what you do from one headset to another. But I am saying it's probably non-trivial.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
if they build it, they will come. then they'll root it to hell and back. just like anything from any current vendor. easy guys. it's not like this is something we never saw before.
https://github.com/facebook ???
Also, what possible IP could Facebook want from Oculus that would be worth that much to them?
I posted in a prior article that I think this is Facebook making a play for the future Google glass market. Portable computing is the big thing now (iPad,etc), and Glass is the next market. Oculus is very similar in nature to Google glass, so if you want to get into the market without playing too much catch up, you dump 2 billion in buying up someone with knowledge and patents in the field.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I am shocked! Shocked I say, that a company who's major VC investor sits on the board of Facebook was bought by Facebook.
Will this kill VR? Probably not. Is this going to usher in VR sooner? Maybe. Is this the wave of the future for social media? Probably not. Most people have no idea what the Oculus is nor do they care. The average person thinks you're a dork for wearing VR but will enjoy it for its novelty for a while. I say all this as someone who backed the Kickstarter and has a DK1.
VR is inherently anti-social and oriented for consumption of media. Most people want to hang out with their friends face to face and not in a virtual land because humans are hardwired for social contact (for the most part). Plus Facebook has an inherent asynchronous aspect that makes it appealing. It's a broadcast that people can respond to overtime. But VR demands equipment and attention. I don't see people having this commitment to VR for this sort of activity.
I honestly don't think it's just the technology not being there that held back VR all these years. The tech to do this has probably been here for about 6 to 10 years if the will to do it had been as well. I think the future of this sort of thing is much more likely in the field of Augmented Reality. Things that enhance your day to day life and help you complete tasks or activities. VR has some appeal for gaming/entertainment, but I think the only serious task I see for it might be teleoperation of robotic systems. Most of the time you want to be able to engage the world around you, not shut it out completely.
One last point, if VR is going to take off like people hope, we need rendering systems that can do real time photo realistic rendering of realistic scenes with serious fidelity. We're getting close, but it's still going to be a while and even then the computing power required is going to be stout.
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
...and I for one welcome the forthcoming VR editions of "FarmVille" and "Panda Jam".
Excellent choice Mark, you're clearly appealing to a core demographic. Your stockholders will be pleased.
Way back in 1994 I played Doom (yes the original) on a VR1 head set. Very limited, but promising technology that didn't seem to have too many hurdles to become main stream.
How come it has taken sooooo long?
Mark my words. World of Facebook coming in 2020.
So I now root for Sony or Microsoft.
The New Coke for the 21st century?
Take a good product, ruin it, have consumers reject it, then bring back the old and net an increase in sales....brilliant (again).
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Yeah, he also said he wouldn't do a xbox 360 version and a xbox one version.. guess what.. he did.. the man is just a sell-out like anyone else.. If the plaform attracks a good revenue you would be stupid not to support it.. And let's be honest, Minecraft really isn't a game, it's just a social gathering where you can build stuff, it really doesn't have a goal... (but that's just fine for people who love to 'play' it, so don't get me wrong)..
uh, the kickstarters didn't buy stock, they donated money. they got exactly what they payed for.
It's not what they're saying.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
But you didn't get ripped off and thats not what happened.
Did the original kick starters get what they paid for? (Dev units I expect?) If so, how did they get ripped off?
It's not what they're saying.
But some others agrees with you, namelly Nicholas Negroponte.
Let's see what time has to say about it.
Kickstarter is not an investment website, its a donation website. Not really sure how they got ripped off other than you don't like Facebook (me either!)
Yes and no. People does donate with something in mind. And they want this state of mind enforced.
You don't donate money to homeless if they're going to buy booze, do you? Most of us don't donate money to them even if we're sure they're going to buy food. Why?
With Kickstart it's the same thing. The guys can be right under the Law, but they have to face the public opinion about the matter. Kickstarters are feeling ripped off, and since they were the very simple reason Oculus managed to get a 2 Billion USD company, it's God Damned Good to spend a good fraction of this money trying to explain themselves - and perhaps, giving something interesting back to these guys.
Bad P/R can be good just to politicians.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
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