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Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

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Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#21

Post by sillysaurus3 »

christoph wrote: post #9
mtgx wrote: post #5

That makes Palmer look even more like a greedy bastard, and that all he cared about was money all along. When he heard the $2 billion amount he was probably like: "So you want us to kill all of our gaming plans now, or should we wait a year to lay it easy on the fans?"

I don't think people should be too harsh on Palmer. He's still very young. To me it feels like Facebook bought this insanely cheap. It's $17bn cheaper than Whatsapp. I'm sure there was some smooth talking involved in the deal. I couldn't help but think of the billion dollars scene from The Social Network[1] when I heard about the deal. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e0n7vTLz1U

Palmer could have made far more money by waiting. Maybe he was tired of Oculus.

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#22

Post by Florin_Andrei »

RollAHardSix wrote: post #16
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed?

You mean 2 Billion Dollars. That's a number beyond greed. That means you are taking care of you, your family, and your employees. Everyone can take the moral high road but if you were staring at a contract like that, could you really say you would turn it down? You also have no idea of the terms. For all we know Oculus will still act as an independent agency only with better access to talent, much more capital access…

> facebook isn't going away in the next few years, they are a microsoft

That was kind of my point. To quote a message I've posted before: Facebook is the new Microsoft, basically. Low on creativity and innovation, high on cash, riding to success a huge wave of demand that would have carried anybody else who just happened to be there at the right time.

So now you're the Oculus guys, and you're thinking "do I really want to be bought by this kind of entity?" The cash sure is nice, as you pointed out, but the nature of the puppet master is also important.

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#23

Post by meowface »

aviraldg wrote: post #4
psbp wrote: post #3

"Zuckerberg explained that he felt that Oculus represented an entirely new post-PC and post-mobile platform." He's probably right. While Google and others are focusing on half-baked wearables as their key to the future, facebook just bought a huge chunk of the most likely successor.

Wrong. Google knows that there's immense potential in VR. It's just too early for them to get into it yet. The pushback from privacy advocates would kill any potential project.

How do we know they're not already working on it as a covert project?

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#24

Post by kevingadd »

Gravityloss wrote: post #8

To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million? Maybe it is so hard.

People have been trying to get VR right for decades, and Oculus's developer units were probably the first remotely accessible devices to let you experience something that approximates good VR.

Reportedly the second-generation oculus devices are even better.

The criteria for 'good' here are things like low latency, good position tracking, low display persistence, etc. Getting those things wrong causes headaches, nausea...

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#25

Post by lelandbatey »

o0-0o wrote: post #19

Virtual reality will never be reality.

I don't think that's true, especially since the internet's already facilitated most of "virtual reality". I can skype with people across the world, order anything I want and have it show up in days. I contest that "virtual reality" is basically already a reality.

But sure, if you keep moving the goalposts then I guess VR won't be a reality :|

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#26

Post by froo »

Sony announces Project Morpheus 6 days ago. Oculus sells to Facebook today and deal started 5 days ago (apparently).

This is either

a) Founders saw writing on the wall and decided to get paid early rather than have to compete with a company with much deeper pockets and a preexisting fanbase.

b) Facebook saw that Sony's announcement validated the space and decided to buy the company with most mindshare at the moment as it is an asset.

People have wondered why Microsoft didn't buy the company? Well, Oculus have seen what, $90M in funding so far? The investors would have wanted what.. 5X 10X ROI?

At 5X.. $450M is a metric fuckton (excuse the language) of money that they could throw at in-house development of something similar. I imagine having a VR kit that integrates heavily with Kinect has the potential to be huge, so they at least have to be thinking about it.

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#27

Post by integraton »

Gravityloss wrote: post #8

To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million? Maybe it is so hard.

Two informative decks from Michael Abrash:

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/MAbrashGDC2013...

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#28

Post by newhouseb »

I'm sure this just means that the legal back and forth happened over five days, not that the deal started five days ago.

This recode article has more detail which makes this much less of a sensationalist story: http://recode.net/2014/03/25/in-googles-shadow-facebooks-zuc...

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#29

Post by clef »

Gravityloss wrote: post #8

To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million? Maybe it is so hard.

That's like saying whatsapp is a fancied-up text messaging app..wait, it is.

Re: Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

#30

Post by Pxtl »

kevingadd wrote: post #24
Gravityloss wrote: post #8

To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million? Maybe it is so hard.

People have been trying to get VR right for decades, and Oculus's developer units were probably the first remotely accessible devices to let you experience something that approximates good VR. Reportedly the second-generation oculus devices are even better. The criteria for 'good' here are things like low latency, good position tracking, low display persistence, etc. Getting those things wrong causes headaches, nause…

> People have been trying to get VR right for decades,

Because display technology wasn't there yet. The thing that made Oculus possible wasn't some miraculous development at Oculus VR, but the fact that smartphones created a massive market of low-cost high-quality super-high-pixel-density tiny screens.

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