Oculus Joins Facebook
oculusvr.com
oculusvr.com
There will be others, though. Lots of others.
I guess it's because I was excited about the gaming and "new experience" potential, and the hope that a young company full of smart people would excel in that space. Unfortunately, the only association I can muster between gaming and Facebook is the spamfest Farmville. The biggest experience I can think of is the data mining.
VR is one of the few upcoming tech changes I can actually see adding "delight" to my computing experience. Alas, I've never experienced any delight with Facebook; at best, I've managed grudging tolerance. I think I'm sad at the loss of what might have been.
see what your friends are seeing, hear, feel... welcome to the hive. Resistance is futile.
Facebook is another company I will refuse to do business with, even if that means I do without something I would otherwise want.
I won't have either but one is worse than the other.
Gamers, particularly PC gamers, are a minority of computing end users. Minorities get less attention than the mainstream. Oculus VR chose gamers, particularly PC gamers, as its beachhead. The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.
But VR's potential isn't limited to gamers. That is what Facebook recognised and is capitalising on with this acquisition. Oculus, as a (perhaps the) leader in the consumer VR space, is well positioned to shape the future of VR and with it consumer computing. They had a choice between a niche and the market, and they are reaching for the moon.
The expanded mandate means gamers will become a minority of Oculus's customer base. It does not follow that their experience nor expectations should degrade. Preëmptively burning Facebook and Oculus for thinking big seems petty.
I am open-minded about Oculus's future at Facebook. It is possible that Facebook will mis-manage Oculus and squander its lead. It's also possible that an independent Oculus would have missed the forest for the trees. That by going 100% for gaming, it would have forsaken a greater destiny. Barring back-seat driving by Facebook management, Oculus has more options at Facebook. More options are good for a young company at the beginning of a open-ended road.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Valve, hell even Dell would have all been acceptable acquirers for most PC gamers backing the Oculus Rift.
I don't think you will need a Facebook login to play games, but Facebook will likely monopolize any social aspects. Even if they don't overtly lock out other social players, I think that developers will be skittish to invest a lot of time and money developing the new Second Life with the risk of Facebook cutting them off at any point if they are seen as a competitor.
Facebook isnt trying to be Apple and buy companies that contribute to their core products. They want to be Disney (who owns ESPN, Pixar and many others).
They've bought these companies (Instagram, Parse, WhatsApp and now Oculus) to largely leave them alone as independant companies operating within Facebook.
Risks with other potential acquisition partners:
(1) Valve - limited scope. Valve would be fine if Oculus's future were limited to gaming. But they add little value, in balance sheet or experience, for a broader play. Valve + Oculus is only marginally better positioned, for revolutionising computing, than an independent Oculus.
(2) Microsoft - too conservative. Big organisation without a history of funding moon shots. As for pairing Oculus with Xbox, I'd copy the concerns with Valve.
(3) Dell - underinvestment. Dell is undergoing a private-equity turnaround focussed on optimising operating metrics for an IPO. Not a healthy environment for an open-ended, capital-hungry start-up with an adventurous future.
Apple would have been a fine home for Oculus. I suspect VR's market isn't mature enough for Cupertino. But I do not see a material difference between Google and Facebook. Privacy concerns exist at both, and both have a mixed record of integrating acquisitions. What both have is lots of ambition and the surplus capital and experience with which to fuel it.
What is is a specific likely worst-case
you have in mind with Facebook?
More precisely they make a play for the "VR socialisation" arena but it's a half-hearted attempt because VR socialisation is some manager's pet project rather than their core business, facebook vr socialisation goes the way of Second Life, and the consequence is the same.
Oculus has 50 employees [1]. Facebook did not pay $40 million per employee to scrap their product.
Oculus is also a bleeding-edge hardware start-up. It was more likely to drop dead all on its own than at the hands of well-capitalised owner.
Facebook did not pay $400 million per employee
to scrap their product.
This deal reminds me of ebay buying Skype: Two technology companies, both with reasonable products, but nothing to do with each other.
The Oculus team is cutting-edge hardware along a completely different vertical, orthogonal to facebook's core. Despite their size they have the talent and expertise to create that entire market by themselves, provided adequate funding. Facebook does not have to interfere at all, beyond writing the cheques. Over three years, Facebook could have itself a new gaming product to compete with Sony and XBox... in five, it might have an innovative consumer device to take on Apple. The conglomerate model typically has better odds of long-term survival - what happens when people grow tired of social in its current form (primarily content curation)? Then facebook's flagship product would be obsolete.
- It would signal a shift toward gimmicky experiences targeting a
casual market that wouldn't spend several hundred dollars on a
piece of esoteric hardware.
- It would spoil an opportunity to partner with a company that has
much more experience in hardware, gaming, dev tools, or anything
else Oculus could use to take off.
- The likely integration with Facebook's authentication and social
services will cause the product to suffer from all the ill will and
distrust Facebook has generated within parts of its userbase and
the developer community. Branding is important, and to these
communities - the ones Oculus likely needs to take off - Facebook's is poison.
Oculus might've been what the Macs needed in order to take gaming market-share from PCs. Missed opportunity for Apple. In my opinion, would've been a bargain for them at $2B.
Once they get acquired...well...Skype Hotmail etc etc...(who are they again?)
And that's ok I guess, there's a lot of drive to create and grow (hack?), being top efficient and innovative on a shoe string budget, until you get a nice big fat pay check.
Maybe the little guys with big ideas are only "useful" until they get acquired, by that I mean that maybe it's more of a natural process that one thinks... Maybe by the time the technology is "invented", showcased and becomes stable enough to be "mainstreamed", it's time to collect your dollars and medal for "honourable service to xxxxx industry" and either move onto something else that will be cool and make you more (or less) money eventually and produce more internet "apps" addicts, or retire to the beach.
When you go after everything at once you go after nothing in particular.
While I agree with most of what you (eloquently) said, I take issue with the idea that gamers' reactions are a result of feeling less special. I'm at most an occasional gamer myself so I can't speak for "gamers," but do give them a little credit. Facebook doesn't have the best track record dealing with gaming companies and, as Notch noted, their motives are inherently different than the motives of the sole Oculus Team. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is a change. And change, particularly for something that appears to be on such a good path, introduces risk. And risk is scary for people who are emotionally invested.
Of course!
I'm surprised no one realises this is move to protect Facebook against Google's move into devices, specifically Google Glass.
Facebook doesn't want to be a sharecropper on a platform owned by Google.
I'd expect them to be looking at other companies in the "connected device" space too: Pebble, FitBit etc.
They betrayed the gamers and this people will now jump on every possible alternative that comes around (and we've heard that there are things coming up already). Also they will hesitate to trust anybody else on something they love that much. This will hurt other start ups.
I don't see the usual FB people using Parse. I see nobody really besides the developers.
All these webpages will go. Like FB. The device will remain there until we manage to implant something directly in our brains. We are talking about a new "mouse" here.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28101518/ns/technology_and_science...
VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing. But now it's owned by the worst company on the planet when it comes to choosing inspired thinking and pushing humanity forward instead of just trying to get inside of our lives (and now our heads.) I am frankly terrified.
Thank God for Valve, I hope they hit the gas and leapfrog these guys now on the tech and poach as many of them as they can. Thank goodness there is still plenty of work left to do and Facebook doesn't own all the VR patents. I am so fucking scared of a world where Facebook has a monopoly on VR. I really hope it doesn't happen.
Sony is developing a competitor with project Morpheus, though.
Occulus was going to be revolutionary because it was supposed to be an open platform. "Here is a headset, this is a starting point" every other company in the world could take it from there and see all the places it could go. How many improvements to the base model could be made. How many novel ways to utilize VR to advance common activities.
Instead, we now have Valve tossing away their project, Sony making its own proprietary toy dongle, and Facebook getting a live camera feed of your life while you use their video services on their proprietary platform with proprietary drivers and patents on everything including the paint job.
It is a pretty big travesty.
Yes, Sony products can never be rooted. Kinnect was a proprietary addon for XBox and look what happened there.
VR has been the Next Thing since before there was a World Wide Web, if not the internet itself. Maybe this time is different, maybe not.
I think what Oculus did was massively de-risk their next ten years. In their business plans, there were undoubtedly very large gray circles with things like "gain overwhelming market share (how?)" and lists of competitors that included, well, everyone in tech.
If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
In exchange, they probably lopped another 10-50x of potential value off the top of their company. Not that they won't see some of that realized in Facebook if this is succesful -- they will. But, they will be sharing the gain around in exchange for getting access to that giant global customer base and being able to tap the considerable resources available at FB.
Perfect contrast with Facebook.
Valve.
> Not that Mr. Newell hasn’t had opportunities to sell out. Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far, said two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
> Although Valve’s finances are private, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimates that the company could be worth around $2.5 billion today.
It's guesswork and no method is explained though, so it's not like that's a very reliable estimate or anything.
I'm not familiar with the intimate details of the Ocululs business plan, but their story page says they have a larger view of the potential for VR:
"revolutionize the way people experience interactive content"
and their vision says nothing about games:
"Immersive virtual reality technology that's wearable and affordable."
Perhaps the negative comments here are part of the natural bitterness from insiders that accompanies any technology as it goes mainstream?
Remember the VR-32 and VRML? Everyone was super excited that we were going to start doing all the things in virtual reality, and then we figured out that it's a really cumbersome way to present most information.
Sure, I understand that. My point is that perhaps folks who went to the trouble of dedicating their lives to VR might have a larger vision than this.
In 1992, you could have defined the Internet in similarly limited terms -- after all, using the Internet largely meant text interfaces. I'm just positing that the folks who run Oculus are a) smart and b) have spent a lot of time thinking about how best to spread VR.
If VR takes off, by definition it will mean expanding beyond FPS games, because most people do not play those (you could alternatively get VR to go mainstream by increasing market penetration of FPS and FPRPG games by orders of magnitude, which might be harder than putting VR to other uses).
Carmack is a ridiculously smart guy who is damned good at squeezing things out of hardware that shouldn't be possible, and if there's anyone that I think could work out the how-to of VR, I think it'd be him, but I'm not sure that I trust his read on what the markets want.
The question isn't so much "will VR take off?" as it is "what could VR possibly do beyond FPS games that could make it take off?" and I just don't have any answer to that at all.
"Designed for gamers, by gamers." [1]
Now, I understand that in the Kickstarted it was promised only the first developer kit and that it was successfully delivered, but I feel very uneasy knowing that the Facebook platform is geared exclusively to casual gaming. My worry is that Facebook will be happy with a VR technically good enough for a social VR but that can't stand the requirements for gaming. I may be too old to understand, but I really don't feel the urge to interact in 3d with my friends to say hello or to watch their holiday's pictures.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-...
VR is way, way, WAY bigger than some hardcore gaming nerds (of which I am one).
What sorts of applications can you imagine? The idea of virtual presence being a killer app is silly, IMO - I've played with both the Oculus Rift and telepresence robots - they're neat, but for meetings/gatherings, I'll take a plain old webcam any day. I can't imagine what Facebook would do with this that I would be interested in.
For example, see how well that's worked out for Tesla.
No just Oculus.
Oculus isn't being conservative here. They're shooting for the moon.
Plus, gaming and socialization go hand in hand - it's amazing that others just don't fucking get this yet and see "gamers communities" as just niches or islands.
Look at #81. http://www.apcoinsight.com/methodologies/tools/el-top-100-co...
Facebook is a prototype of what "social networking" should be. Anyone who took five minutes out of their day could think up ten ways "social networking" could be better, and probably all of them would be incompatible with facebook's business model.
The oculus VR acquisition feels special, in that they aren't just buying users/reach, but something more substantial and forward looking. If they're smart, they'll let the oculus team work on the track they've been on, and let Facebook teams develop the "non-gaming VR experiences" they want to push.
Hard to think how much the landscape would need to shift for FB to be broke in 5 years. If Oculus delivers on their VR dreams, that alone could potentially bring an almost-bankrupt FB back from the brink.
I admire what Facebook has achieved, but it's clear to me that they don't understand what their actual role is, or what people "want" from Facebook as a company if it is to survive. There is an air of mild desperations to the whole enterprise that hints at the acknowledgement of an imminent demise. This acquisition reeks of that desperation.
Facebook is the antithesis to Occulus. They have never created any technology, they add zero value to the the real world, and have no future potential in the long run. Occulus selling to Facebook would have been like Tesla selling to Proctor and Gamble after they released the Roadster. A company with a technology so radical it can change the industry, succumbing to weakness and cashing out to an old money company that has no expertise in the field for some chump change.
I am filled with sadness and disappointment. I believe Palmer Luckey will regret this decision.
What a waste. I hate Facebook for doing this. And I'm not too happy with Oculus for accepting this either.
com'n, VR FPV in FarmVille would be an experience to die for :)
Don't even get me started on the silliness that is Farmville - no more than a glorified Skinner box.
It looks like they really are driving a long term strategy of being at the core on human -> human communication.
Someone I know had already identified FB as one of the Big Four several years ago, analogizing to the Big Four during the robber baron days of steel and rail. The other three are Apple, Amazon, and Google.
All four have some sort of machine learning / AI race going on. They are not the only ones around (Twitter, for example).
But this is pretty big. Google has the Glasses project. Apple probably has something cooking somewhere. And I have no idea about Amazon.
I also wonder if FB will keep the team together. It'd be a shame for John Caramak to skip out after the acquisition.
I mean, I'm sure Facebook has some amazing PHP and Python on their backend servers but has anyone not checked out the awfulness that is Facebook's web site ? UX is not supposed to be a four letter word.
What do Oculus gain from this that they couldn't have obtained with their $2.4m Kickstarter ? I don't believe Facebook won't be monitoring every penny spent there.
Oculus was not our last hope, there is another: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/avegantglyph/a-mobile-p...
"Facebook [...] a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform."
Can anyone put facts or numbers to those last two statements? Is Facebook putting any concerted effort beyond PR/vanity projects into those goals?
0 - http://internet.org/ (kinda funny that I use a cliff note link for this)
I've always found Facebook's stock to be a ridiculously risky long-term investment since their entire growth plan is predicated on monetizing an already established customer base, where a single event that causes people to switch en masse to a more private/secure social network would destroy the company. After today's acquisition I no longer think this.
This doesn't happen in two years at all -- it's hard to keep track, but Google Glass has been in its public beta release for over a year and yet there are no people walking around using them, at least where I'm from.
Plus I think most of us are still using the keyboard (be it virtual or physical) to tap instant messages and email -- if VR would be so mature in two years that we'd be able to do a lot of things through a virtual world, why haven't we ditched keyboards straight away?
There is likely a user input revolution around the corner, but I'd be looking at the 2024 date or later. This is probably a good reason why to be concerned about the purchase -- Facebook seems unlikely to care about Oculus games beyond what Oculus promised in their Kickstarter.
Before the 1964 World's Fair, the notion of video chat to accompany the telephone was considered science fiction. Even after the technology was demonstrated to the public, it stayed in the realm of science fiction, as seen in the film 2001, until the 21st century. I really think that being able to interact with other people in a digital world a la the Matrix would sell millions of units instantly.
I'd rather talk to my friends' faces, albeit on a computer screen, rather than their avatars in a virtual room. Face to face communication isn't practical when both parties are wearing something over their eyes.
Uhm...No thanks. Second life has already been tried.
Why does this idea keep coming up? It sucks every.single.time.
There's nothing magical about 2nd life, but in a first person POV and in 3d.
Or are you proposing that I look at a high bandwidth, 3d video stream of somebody with a black rrectangle strapped to their face while they look at my complimentary version?
Imagine if you had an actual supernatural button that you could press to teleport yourself to an alternate dimension in which you could chat with friends. It wouldn't be a more effective tool for communication than a phone or video chat, but I'm sure you'd often use it since magic is, well, magical. VR is the closest you're gonna get to that experience.
Edit: And hopefully there would be a workaround for the issue of goggles obstructing the face.
MS, Apple, Google, Sony all have their own closed(* Android is arguable, I know) devices that they would prefer to limit the technology to. The benefit to Facebook is to have a primary interface perhaps hosted on another platform but not completely dependent on it.
I can think of three obvious negatives:
Carmack's apparently successful work using mobile graphics hardware to generate acceptable output for the Rift could allow a much wider adoption among the casual users who don't have a hardcore gaming PC/latest generation console. Facebook might focus on producing a low-cost version that lacks the resolution/low latency which would be preferable to gamers / professional 3D users. An extensive patent portfolio could inhibit higher-end competitors from easily addressing that market.
The second concern is that Facebook would in political superpower-like ways abuse the power to grant access to a popular VR platform and demand concessions such as mandatory Facebook accounts for gaming, an egregious cut of royalties, banning of anything that "replicates Facebook functionality" etc.
Thirdly, is the probably the most common knee-jerk consumer issue; ultra creepy Facebook, logging and mining everything that you foveate on, from the ad logos in virtual environments to the facial/bodily features of your friends' avatars. They build a more detailed model of your own desires and motivations than you consciously have of yourself.
* Because the Oculus guys are seen to have sold out.
* Because Facebook is seen to be a ruthless exploiter of personal information.
I, for one, was actually days away from buying an Oculus device but I'm going to hold off for now. It's a combination of the negativity from here being infectious and the fact that if Facebook decided to buy now, maybe there's something much bigger on the horizon (apart from the DK2).
Theirs will likely become the superior product, organically.
Looks like ALL companies in this world would be a good fit for a facebook acquisition.
So there is room to hope for a successful partnership. Oculus has a really phenomenal product and partnering with Facebook is going to scale that product MUCH faster than it would've otherwise. This could be the perfect deal for both companies.
Don't get me wrong, my heart sank when I heard it was Facebook. And the WSJ's article on how disingenuous they were with their kickstarter backers is still real. But in the truly long-term, we might look back on today as a big moment for virtual reality.
1st rule: you do not talk about the money 2nd rule: you DO NOT talk about the MONEY 3rd rule: you talk about how the acquirer and acquiree shares the same vision and dreams that would enable the acquiree to build great things.
That said, I'm saddened. A possible greater exposure could have happened from another company purchasing it, Apple for instance, or even (some will shudder), Google.
I'm not going to give up on Oculus just yet though, but I'm somewhat disapointed. Even if Facebook doesn't ruin it, it's... well, it's still Facebook.
With Google there would still be a very excellent chance the device would run across PCs (Windows/Linux and Macs) and maybe even iOS devices (if Apple allowed it) along with Android. With Apple, obviously not, it would be Mac/iOS only and fuck everyone else.
An "open computing platform"? What are they talking about?