Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Oculus, has been known to show up on Reddit to respond to fans since the virtual reality’s Kickstarter first showed up two years ago. Yesterday, he took to Reddit again to reply to many angry fans about their concerns.
Though his post on Reddit closely resembles the official Oculus statement, his follow-up interactions responding to Reddit’s questions do shed light on some of the bigger concerns people have been voicing.
On targeting Facebook’s market and losing control of Oculus:
On the timing of the announcement:
On Facebook integration:
On indie developers:
On where $US2 billion gets spent:
On bringing balance to the force:
And finally, there was no reply to this post:
Top image by Charles Dharapak, Associated Press, altered by Kotaku
Comments
37 responses to “Oculus Addresses Some Of The Internet’s Biggest Concerns”
Really, this just reads like a bunch of people with no clue about how the world actually works having their illusions shattered.
As a veteran of many technology start-ups, I just can’t do anything but shake my head. Having such a massive cash infusion would be a dream come true for us, the people actually doing the work and to hear supposed “fans” pulling support based off of such nonsense would be absolutely demoralizing.
What the community giveth, the community reserve the right to taketh away.
Goes without saying but a lot of companies are not aware of the way things work.
For example, imgur would be boycott and banished if it sold out to google, facebook, apple etc. All controversial and troublemaking companies (and anything similar), and/or companies with anywhere around 50% acceptance, 50% rejection, should expect their next purchase of any popular/hot new entity to be abandoned with gusto, and rightly so. Often these companies don’t realize that sometimes the reason a particular service or product is popular, is because it’s NOT theirs, which is what we have in the instance where facebook bought whatsapp. They’re not the same thing but they’re both mass message transmission services.
This is the thing the internet has decided it will be the most bitter about this week. There’s nothing he can say to dissuade the internet when there are such bitter tears to be cried.
Your so right mate. Not to mention the fact it might not be a bad thing considering forces like Carmack left ID to work on Social gaming and Oculus.. so why not combine both.
The Star Wars one was fantastic.
Yeah, reminded me of one of my bugbears with Star Wars… who in their right mind would’ve thought that bringing ‘balance to the force’ was a good idea? The Jedi Knights had the monopoly on the force, the balance was dramatically skewed to the forces of the light side of the force. How did they think the ‘balancing’ would go? Make things even more light? Anakin may have balanced out the number of remaining Jedi to the number of Sith, but why would anyone ever think that was something to be encouraged? They should’ve double-checked that prophecy to make sure it was him, then murdered him and told his mother there was an accident.
In a way it’s a good statement on the blindness of privilege really, assume your own position is neutral/balanced and therefore the status quo is good. Then you get a reality check by someone actually giving you what you ask for but didn’t realise the consequences of.
The Jedi were idiots & deserved it. Also the Sith were narcissistic egomaniacal dicks & deserved it. The galaxy would be better off without the force. That Kreia, she had the right idea.
It’s because George Lucas’ stance on the sides of the force differ from the perspective we get on it from expanded materials.
From George’s perspective (and indeed the film specific angle of the story), the Light and Dark sides of the force are not counterweights or balancing each other. Specifically GL stated that the Dark side is more like a cancer that pollutes and destroys what the force is supposed to be (embodied by the light side.), therefore meaning the dark side creates an imbalance in an otherwise living and thriving system. This is what the films mean when they talk about bringing balance “back” to the force and actively seek to remove the influence of the dark side to bring a final conclusion.
What we see in the expanded works is more along the lines of a two sides of the same coin situation though, where balance would mean eternal conflict.
This is what it sounds like, when neckbeards cry.
Haha! Nailed it.
While I have no opinions one way or the other towards this, I’m kind of skeptical about these statements about facebook not interfering with Oculus.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
That’s the biggest thing. Everyone is generally pretty entitled to be calling bullshit on their PR.
Facebook isn’t buying companies as pets. They want to see a return on their investment. And $2Billion is a big chunk of change to hand over and then say “yeah, just carry on as you were”…
I don’t know. It depends on if Zuckerburg is still in control or if he’s a puppet for the board. If he’s in control, I can see them buying OR just to leave them alone. If I suddenly had a multi-billion dollar company, with that much funds in the bank, I sure as hell would look as Occulus Rift and think “Hey, that company would be a *lot* cooler if they had an odd $2b under their belt and the near unlimited funds of Facebook so that they don’t have to worry about running dry”
While I agree that the vast majority of, and usually the loudest, reactions have been a bit over the top
These people obviously feel that, at this stage, they dont agree with this decision and want to have a voice, of which they are entitled
Taking the piss out of them is no better, or uncommon, an internet habit than the reactions you are taking the piss out of
Come on mate he was just having a bit of fun. I found his comment to be hilarious!
Calm down buddy.
One of the biggest over-reactions to news i’ve ever seen…
Clearly haven’t heard anything about Shapelle Corby, then. 😛
https://imgflip.com/i/7ry19
Yeah, I don’t think its a big deal at all.
I like the idea of VR social spaces, if possible, reminds me of a lot of SCIFI books etc, where social media and chat rooms exist in VR instead of just on a browser.
Your comment got me thinking about “normal people” applications of this technology. Imagine what it’d be like if you could buy cameras that filmed for VR goggles. Astronauts could use this camera to film what it’s like in space and we could see Earth in a way that a 2D picture could never show us. Take it up a mountain, down under water, you’d be able to experience things that are otherwise impossible. Due to illness my mum can’t do much more than light walking, so she’s certainly never gonna do those things, imagine if I could carry a camera around and show her all the places I go that she never can. It’d be totally ace.
Honestly, Oculus Rift in the hand of gamers would never be used for more than having a bit of a laugh, 3D teabagging and all that. Who knows what other clever people with other ideas can do with it.
Indeed, this sounds like an amazing idea. I’m pretty sure when the VR stuff finally hits the market, some people will think of doing this and others will follow suite (obviously not quite to the extent you are thinking of, but maybe they will make high res VR versions of famous places etc).
I’m still not sure what leverage FB has over developmental control of the project, and this is the only thing I give a shit about. So I’m not angry or happy, I’m just waiting.
Who wants to play hungry hungry hippos
I always want to play Hungry Hungry Hippos…
Also, totally agree on the ‘wait and see’ approach. There’s just too much that hasn’t been divulged yet to get too up in arms.
We lost the little pellets so we replaced them with Kool Mints.
Then we put the box away for two years.
That was a quality find.
This hasn’t really done anything to assuage my concerns. It looks a lot like the standard PR speech you get when a studio is acquired with promises that they retain full creative control and that their current projects will remain unaffected. If this was a game studio acquisition, it would be most likely that a year down the track, the parent company will have gotten their hooks in sufficiently enough to destroy the reputation it once had and a year later, the studio is dissolved as part of “restructuring and reassessing priorities”.
I’m also particularly concerned about the line that this move is by Facebook to try and recapture the audience they’re losing. Facebook isn’t exactly known for its great business decisions and respect for privacy or communication with the people using their platform. This just brings up all sorts of visions of desperate tricks and ploys to capitalise on people using the Rift. Facebook just seems like a poor choice for a bedfellow all round to me. I hope I’m proven wrong.
I would be very interested in reading/hearing replies from John Cormack about this whole thing as he has been there & been in the gaming something like 20 years. His opinion is something I’m hoping to hear very soon.
I feel that the internet is really overreacting to this deal, I’m pissed don’t get me wrong, but this is something I see doing good, not bad for Oculus and maybe Facebook to.
It really highlights the problem I have with kickstarter and I’ve said it here and have been shot down before about it. You are investing with out the benefit and they are recieving money with zero risk and responsibility.
If I was to invest in a company I own a piece of that company but not if I invest through kickstarter. You are being told that it is a fancy way of Preordering a product. But as shown here, you really are an idiot investor.
So this company sold for 2 billion. What was it worth at the start of the kickstarter? Is the total company worth the amount raised? If so then to make it easy for my bad maths. If I invested $100 than I should now have return of $100 000.
Was this addressed at all in the ama?
I see a few hyper-reactionary folks, but the overall knee-jerk reaction of, “Oh fuck, what? This is terrible news for gamers!” is pretty fair.
If someone you hate to the core gets heavily involved in obtaining complete control over something you love, what is WRONG with you if you aren’t upset about it?
In a sense, some of that reaction was the same as when Microsoft first announced they were making a game console and that turned out pretty damned well. Of course MS’ rep back then was just charging too much and being a bit shit rather than catastrophic privacy violations & a culture of corporate arseholery…
While I personally held a lot of scepticism about how successful VR will be I can honestly say I felt nothing but disappointment at this announcement.
I think the internet needs to take a break from the internet.
That’s an awful lot of cash for a small company with a niche product. I think I need to find a way to get in on this Zuckerberg money. I wonder if he’d pay my rent if I was to send him this picture of a duck that I drew.
Can’t hurt to try.
OculusVR belongs to OculusVR. They can do whatever the fuck they want to do. All this nonsense about OculusVR not being allowed to do what they want with their own company is straight up hypocritical. With that logic all the anti-DRM talk over the last few years was just hot-air.
i.e. ‘being able to resell the property that you own.
Wow, it really shows how much a certain demographic hates Facebook. Personally I fall into that demo. I’m 30, a gamer, and I deleted my Facebook account long ago and can’t stand the company and what it has actually created in our society.
I was also really looking forward to the Oculus, and to some extent I still am. Palmers comments, and even some of the comments above are correct, this will be somewhat beneficial for the Rift.
Most of us probably won’t argue that the massive cash injection will help them hire more talented engineers, and also help toward custom hardware and so on. However, the real issue that most of us have (like Minecraft creator ‘Notch’) is that we don’t trust Facebook. We don’t believe that Zuckerberg will just let them ‘operate independently’ and not somehow try to leverage/change what Oculus and the Rift is all about. This reddit discussion, as well as the recent astroturfing they have done is just PR and damage control due to the fall-out.
What Oculus has to do now is re-assure its followers that it will stay true to the mission of the company and deliver a kick ass uncompromising VR solution. They can talk all they want until then.
Seriously, what were people expecting… Occulus could NOT stay indie. If every game needs to have VR encoding in it, and suitable controls, then VR needs to be a sizeable portion of the market.
After 2 years, Occulus was still in development stage… and was having supply and distribution problems for some of its components.
You want VR on your computer, and not a hipster paper weight, it needed manufacturing capital, distribution, marketing, advertising.
Could of been worse… the speculation were Microsoft, Google or Valve would of bought them after Sony announced Morpheous, and each one of them has their clear flaws and agendas.