Oculus Rift has been sold to Facebook for $2 Billion. This is great for the console in general in terms of it's potential distribution and recognition beyond us game devs and hardcore gamers... but this is where the outcry is also coming from. Even Minecraft's creator, Notch stated that the news is "scary" enough to make him think about dropping the Oculus Rift version of his game.
We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014
What's scary, is indeed what a Facebook owned videogame system could entail... subpar microtransaction-driven social games or social apps like, oh god... seeing your friend's facebook feed in full virtual reality. As a 30 year old, this means nothing but a panoramic hell of baby pictures, sonograms and cryptic one line messages where you aren't sure if somebody's going to have their 4th baby, leave their now second baby daddy/momma or a combo of both.
Let's hope Facebook doesn't put their "marketing knowhow" into this very promising and possibly industry-changing console and leave it to the very talented dev teams involved with it already. With Oculus, "What's App?" and a few years back, Instagram... Facebook has been buying out what could have replaced them later on and taking in their user base. For those like me who've been around since AOL Pages and Xanga, Facebook represents the current title of "social hotspot" that was once owned by Yahoo, then AOL, and later MySpace. As videogame consoles/games continue to be social hotspots themselves, Facebook is strategically throwing their money into the area of VR gaming. Either way, very soon, many people will know what the Oculus Rift is... just hope Farmville VR and Wink To FB Like My Baby Pics aren't the only choices we get.
(image by me with The Tester's Matt Smith wearing the Oculus)
#oculus #facebook
