Sour grapes. In the era of multi-billion dollar acquisitions and high expectations, it’s easy to have them. But what has driven the mass outrage against Oculus and their sale to Facebook for a cool $2 billion? The endless fear of the sellout, the group or person or brand that catered to one market and then, sensing the end of the road, turned to the wide world and re-rigged itself for mass acceptance.
To be clear, Oculus owes its backers exactly one thing: a headset. They don’t owe them unswerving loyalty, everlasting penury, or a bow and a scrape at gaming conferences. The expectation that Oculus thought about its audience at all is ludicrous. In the choice between the cool kids wanting the TV and the nerds wanting rock tumbler the nerds will always pick $2 billion.
Another thing is also clear: the idea that Facebook will do anything but eviscerate Oculus, spread its developers through its cavernous guts, and spit out the husk with a shrug is laughable. If Oculus ships product, it will be the last Oculus product backers will own. The next product that will come – if it comes at all – will be a way to “Like” physical advertisements in the real world to gain a reward of nutrient slurry from a Facebook-branded Camelbak.
But this is the Internet and so scream we must. First, we have some very measured – and unmeasured – Twitter back and forth. Joel Johnson, thankfully, explains the horror quite ably:
If I did the math right (and who knows lol) my $300 KS investment in Oculus ended up being worth $250,000…to them.—
Joel Johnson (@joeljohnson) March 26, 2014
"I helped build that" is part of the Kickstarter story. But now I've helped build (in a tiny way)…what? Another startup scheme?—
Joel Johnson (@joeljohnson) March 26, 2014
Then we have the real complaint: that Oculus was supposed to be about gaming and, instead, it’s now about VR. For two years Oculus has been a gamer’s nirvana, allowing you to use a virtual toilet or play Half-Life 2 in glorious 3D. It was supposed to be a way to become completely alone and immersed in the game (a prospect, sadly, that says more about the gaming culture than the technology). Now, however, Facebook wants to pull a Google and build a way to put their product in front of as many faces as often as possible. Gamers know instinctively that this is a bad idea. Just as they only rarely accept the presence of advertising in games – and suffer for it by paying $60 for an optical disk and some plastic packaging – they know it’s not fun to be marketed to in an immersive environment. It’s like being pulled out of a dream to be sold a Coke.
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