11–20 of 369 posts
I'm wondering, what's John Carmack take on this, he quit idSoftware to join Oculus, which was very open by that time. He always was proponent of openness... right now from a laik perspective it looks it was mistake to leave id.
I'm wondering, what's John Carmack take on this, he quit idSoftware to join Oculus, which was very open by that time. He always was proponent of openness... right now from a laik perspective it looks it was mistake to leave id.
(Sorry, had to do it. I accept the inevitable downvotes as long as I make one person smile)
I can't honestly blame him here. I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out', so much as it is that it's uncertain what exactly Facebook is going to want out of the deal. Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company. There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose, so the question becomes what exactly they do wa…
I think that's very much the issue.
Seriously, "virtual reality" and "Facebook" are two things I don't want to think about in the same context. The former is an extremely promising piece of technology that can change the way people work, talk and play. The latter is a gigantic online advertising engine. Put them together and there's only one direction virtual reality can go: a new way to advertise to Facebook users (once they "bring virtual reality to everyone" of course. /eyeroll ).
> Mojang's Notch was more direct in a tweet. "We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus," he said. "I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out."
> We reached out for further comment, and he clarified his position. "Well, VR has huge potential in many fields, including social. I can see why Facebook would want to get in to this," he told Polygon. "As a game developer, however, I don't ever want to get stuck trying to target a platform not focused on games. People have made this mistake before."
> "Facebook creeps me out." Whether or not you agree with his decision, having Notch pull away from talks with you creates an instant credibility "situation". It's also noteable that Notch had been meeting with the Oculus team just two weeks ago[0], was tweeting about them in rather gushing terms[1] and seemed incredibly inspired to work on VR ideas[2]. He is now the personification of the a near universal feeling of…
I can't imagine the Oculus team ever reaching their fundraising goal if backers knew the founders were going to sellout before ever reaching the vision they shared to get people to back it in the first place.
EDIT: Notch seems to have just confirmed the postulation above in his latest blog post:
"I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."
http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...