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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.
"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.
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.
That's why I invest all my money in Bitcoin instead of kickstarter.
The companies you work with say a lot about your priorities. I think it's fair to send a message to Oculus that a cash grab with a company with completely different models and motivations does not speak well of their priorities.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
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 ?
Zuck. You have billions for promises, that is fine. But Notch got a product I enjoy and never haunt me across the internet for likes. Therefore his opinion carry weight not yours.
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
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.
Laura, welcome to Slashdot. It is great to see such a positive outlook from a first time poster.
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
Sometimes it's better to pull early than live with the consequences.
Notch sells a product.
Facebook sells you.
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
"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'?
Steven King novel. Frankly, I'm not entirely disappointed that a homicidal supernatural clown isn't being brought to virtual reality. Those are nightmares I'd just as soon do without.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
The Occulus Mod for Minecraft is pretty flawless. This changes nothing.
Anyone that pays someone to make money with no expectations in return is a fool.
Expectation: Pay money and get promised reward.
I'm pretty sure they met the expectation for that project. As for them "selling out", well duh. The vast majority of their funding came from their VC rounds, not kickstarter. VCs are usually looking for an exit and these days want to control burn rate until they get to there. Honestly they are probably better off now with Facebook. FB will want to get the product to market, where the VCs wanted to get the COMPANY to market.
As for all the paranoid NSA, ads in my eyes crap, it's just nerd-rage bullshit. As long as they don't close the SDK, and there is literally no logical reason for them to do that in this case, I don't see a problem. And hey, at least Google didn't aquiri-hire or Moto them.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
If you have to ask, you wouldn't comprehend the answer.
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.
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
Oh Crimea river.
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.
I mean I get that it's an "important backer" (what percentage of $2.4M is $10k?) pulling out, but there really has been no discussion or public planning of Minecraft to the OR.
I don't like Facebook owning OR, but at the same time I don't like people treating notch like some god of indies. I guess it was unfair to ask why this was "news" worthy.
I should be asking: why does anyone care what notch thinks about a device he has no input on other than: "yo fuck facebook"?
Facebook sells you because you use their product for free.
If you've paid for it directly, then you actually are the customer.
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
Negatory. TV and newspapers have long been in the business of selling you to their advertisers. Any actual entertainment or news produced as a result is simply a happy accident.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fb fan (don't even have an account), but bagging on them for doing what every multimedia conglomerate has been doing for decades seems a little silly.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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
what possible IP could facebook want from Oculus that would be worth that much to them?
Technologies that allow them to directly compete with things like google glass? the oculus is a vr console that has lower lag than any other vr headset ever made, seems to me that's the piece they wanted and its more likely to end up in augmented reality displaying us advertisements and convincing us to like things than FB going from a platform for casual gaming to producing tech geared towards hardcore gamers.
I'm not the only one. If you read the founders Reddit posts they also appear to be under that assumption.
Ok explain to me what possible scenario they would post "Dude we're f***ing rich we sold our tech to a creativity grave yard, thanks for the support early on screw you guys i'm going home (to my new home on my private island)"
Sure, pot is plentiful, cheap, and legal. I'll give ya 1/2 oz of say, Girl Scout Cookies, Purple Urkle, or perhaps some Wax, Shatter, or honey oil? Maybe you prefer to eat or drink your THC, got that covered as well....
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
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.
Technologies that allow them to directly compete with things like google glass?
Either that or they plan to turn facebook into Second Life.
Or both at once - you walk down the street and see facebook profiles floating over people's heads.
Who knows...but you can bet it isn't good.
No sig today...
Pot is illegal here, but I'll trade a copy of "Lawnmower Man - The Game" for DOS, a set of of MSDOS 2.00 source code on 5.25" diskettes hand-labeled by Bill Gates, and a full-height 5.25" diskette drive to read them.
That fulfills your VR jones and your tech-cool jones in a practical way.
Oculus DK-II only, though. That high-latency nonsense is for the birds.
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.
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Are you sure that they're trying to produce the Metaverse and not just the anarcho-capitalistic dystopia part?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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.