I know it's a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy. I suspect this is impossible due to the early nature of the VR market. Maybe just an FTC requirement _not_ to require a FB login?
It appears VR is still too small of a market for them to care about.
1) VR ever becoming a huge player. It might. It might not. Right now there's no real evidence that VR will actually become a big deal, and Facebook could argue that this is a niche offering that can't be anti-competitive because there's no real market yet.
2) The feasibility of VR technology independent of major vendors. There's a strong possibility that without a huge R&D budget VR will never overcome the hurdles that might keep it out of the mainstream. Facebook could argue that removing Oculus would doom VR to failure in the market.
3) The Sirus/XM merger removed 100% of satellite radio competition (there's only one vendor left after the merger), but both Sirius and XM successfully argued that the market isn't big enough to support multiple vendors. Facebook could argue a similar case, that for the health of the VR market there should be fewer competitors.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if any of those would be winning arguments, but based on previous anti-trust cases I've followed that would be the strategy I would expect. And it might be why the FTC didn't go down that path.
-What if a lot of people use these in the future
-What if they're really comfy when they get slim, and people use them all the time, even for essentially web browsing.
-Later models can easily have internal and mouth facing cameras so you can smile at people in VR
-Let's intimately observe the finest twitch of every expression felt by our users, peering deep into their minds, learning more about how to manipulate and destroy humans than anyone ever thought possible.
(Apologies to George Orwell.)
What would you do with it? What wouldn't you do with it?
While that would cool for short-term, independent Oculus can stagnate. VR still needs many more billions to be truly usable, and I don't think independent company will be able to fund it.
My experience has been that technology is far more likely to stagnate at BigCo than SmallCo - especially if SmallCo's only source of revenue is said technology.
I don't think the issue with VR at this point is so much technical than it is that nobody's yet been creative enough to make something truly unique with it.
I'm still a believer, but I suspect there are other non-VR technologies that either need to catch up or just figure out how to dovetail for VR to be anything other than a novelty.
Only when AR is a thing will they stat to push for profitability.
This should be illegal. Amazon and Uber have wiped out small players.
In terms of loss, the actual hardware is profitable as far as I've heard.
There should be regulations around both of these, but they'll need to be different ones.
Oh what’s that? Your eyes looked at the logo on the shirt the hero is wearing, are you perhaps interested in learning more about where you could buy it?