Minecraft creator says he’s canceled talks for Oculus Rift version
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Whether or not you agree with his decision, having Notch pull away from talks with you creates an instant credibility "situation".
It's also noteable that Notch had been meeting with the Oculus team just two weeks ago[0], was tweeting about them in rather gushing terms[1] and seemed incredibly inspired to work on VR ideas[2].
He is now the personification of the a near universal feeling of betrayal in the community. Will be interesting to see how this develops.
[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/443541395543162880
I can't imagine the Oculus team ever reaching their fundraising goal if backers knew the founders were going to sellout before ever reaching the vision they shared to get people to back it in the first place.
EDIT: Notch seems to have just confirmed the postulation above in his latest blog post:
"I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."
http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
Just like facebook's Frankensteinian monstrous mish-mash of consumer/content/advertiser/publisher crowd-funding in its current state is a mish-mash that ends up meaning nothing in the end. You are not an equity partner, you really have no say in how decisions are made, you are not a lender, you are and are not a client (depending on whether they actually give you the damn 'thing' or not due to a host of reasons, going bust, running out of money, fraud, etc.)
Has this ever happened? I was under the impression that the funds raised through Kickstarter are spent on the kickstarted projects. If after spending the money, the project "fails", how can there be a refund?
I'm sorry, but where is the stupidity? Kickstarter is a specific tool available to founders/innovators/creatives that allows us to reach a community of supporters quickly and efficiently.
Like all tools, it has a specific way that it operates, and to keep such a new thing from spinning out of control, it is relatively simple and has few rules. Fortunately, we are all made aware of this going in. Backers generally pledge to receive a product. The creator benefits from early access to cash which allows them to build their product.
This is what happened with Oculus, and they have already delivered vouchers to all backers which they could have redeemed for the original developer version from last year, the current developer version coming in July, or the consumer version still definitely coming towards the end of this year.
I fail to see how Oculus gaining a parent company somehow "lays bare the sheer stupidity" of the system Kickstarter provides. People pledged for a high quality VR device, and Oculus promised to change the world. It seems these things will happen.
One of the most compelling opportunities provided by virtual reality is not just gaming, but it's capability to put us somewhere else, including in a virtual room with our loved ones. Virtual reality enables an interaction that humans have never before been able to experience - the ability to hang out in a virtual space with another person.
Facebook, whose primary goal has generally been to provide a platform for connecting humans to eachother, clearly sees the value in VR's ability to provide this new experience for us. As such, they've used their purchasing power to buy a stake in the VR game and help grow this new technology. Some day, we will be able to hang out with out loved ones, visit the doctor, or join a game with friends all in a shared virtual space.
This is a future made possible by the Kickstarter model, which enabled Oculus to get the start they needed to commercialize Virtual Reality.
Tell me again how that is stupid?
What strikes me as stupid is the huge number of people decrying this move as some kind of perversion of the original Kickstarter promise, or some kind of bait and switch. It seems to be the logical progression of a company creating a ground-breaking new human interface device. Should they stay independent indefinitely just because they were crowd funded? I don't see how that would make any sense, or why such a modification to the Kickstarter model would be any kind of improvement.
When you contribute -- note contribute, but invest -- to a Kickstarter campaign, you're buying into the perk you get and pretty much nothing else.
I can understand being upset that the company didn't do what you hoped, but considering it an investment is a bit of an overestimation.
Me, I think Kickstarter is to fault for being sold as a tool for contributors. You go to kickstarter.com, it's like a shopping mall of the future. For what Kickstarter say they are, they should be a plugin that companies get to put on their website or something, not something that gets marketed to consumers.
Kickstarter is not investment. I've never invested money in a company, but I've invested labor in exchange for shares; I was, thus, a stakeholder, and had a say in a number of decisions the company made.
If I buy a product off a store, a pair of sneakers, and they turn out to be shitty and fall to pieces in a week, I'm entitled to my money back or a working pair of sneakers. However, when you fund through Kickstarter something that says "Oh Hai Future Shoes", you're not buying sneakers.
If I invest in a company and they turn out to be using child labor, I can try and wield whatever powers I have in my shares to stop that practice. I can also divest and shame. However, when you fund "Oh Hai Future Shoes" through Kickstarter, you're not investing. You're not buying a vision of the future of shoes. At best, you can expect your rewards (usually a prototype of said sneakers) to be delivered.
But if they sell out to Nike shortly thereafter? And you thought you had an emotional connection?
This is why I kind of fault Kickstarter. It's just too weird a model; it allows fine, smart people like yourself to make unwarranted leaps of logic so that money flows that otherwise might not happen are made common and large.
At its core, understood as FAQs explain -- but not as the website in general is structured -- Kickstarter is a tool for business. Why does it have a shopping mall-like website? Why isn't it just an extension of tip jar tools for webmasters?
(I'm reminded of the Alec Baldwin movie with Jack Lemmon where he's screaming through a pep talk -- "TO GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE WHICH IS DOTTED!!". This is what Kickstarter does.)
Sure, you can hope that the recipient of your contribution will use it in the way you want, and will hold the same values and plan for the company that you do, but in reality, that's an entirely unreasonable expectation to have.
The thing is, though... I don't see this particular example as the Oculus founders acting in bad faith. They made a business decision that made sense for them and their product. Sure, they get a big payday, but I bet they also believe that this is the great (maybe even best) way to make their product successful. The fact that you or I or any of the contributors might disagree is, well, irrelevant.
Personally, I think a lot of people are making a big deal over something that... isn't. There's a lot of hate for Facebook around, some of it justified, some not. The knee-jerk reaction of a FB acquisition being bad is getting quite tiring to me. Why not wait and see how it goes? FB at least seems to have a better track record of successful acquisitions that don't destroy the acquiree than Google does.
Oculus benefited greatly from selling itself as the future of VR gaming. That was the image they cultivated, that is why their Kickstarter was so successful. That is why people contributed. The Facebook deal most likely means a big shift of focus to social VR. There's a big difference between hoping a company will share your personal values when it gets successful, and being sold a particular plan which is then abandoned in favour of a big payoff.
Only if the projects backed aren't Free and Open-Source.
taking a stand against Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and now Oculus ?
I know that Notch wants to develop games with passionate people, but he has to understand that this acquisition was the best thing that could happen to both VR and Oculus.
Anyway, Notch has been infamously known for his quick rants (see the "youtuber he insulted" issue)
Like google? Or Microsoft?
Microsoft ? They already have a gaming branch so why not, but for the same reason as Google, people wouldn't have noticed it much.
But Facebook ? Everybody around me is going to talk about it, even non-gamers. You have no idea how huge this is for VR.
I was hoping for something more personal out of Oculus. Something I wouldn't have to think about sharing with my great aunts and the wider public via the NSA
But if you really desire more convincing, all of those companies have large existing business units devoted to selling consumer devices or licensing things to people selling consumer devices. Those business units have executives, budgets, reporting structures, etc. It is very unlikely any of those companies would buy Oculus to run it as an autonomous unit, like Facebook is saying they will do with Oculus for now.
Never say never. Especially with a company that likes to surprise...
"A logical element or segment of a company (such as accounting, production, marketing) representing a specific business function, and a definite place on the organizational chart, under the domain of a manager. Also called department, division, or a functional area."
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/business-unit.h...
It's a term that seems so totally generic that I feel like you have to work really, really hard to find an organization at scales far, far below where Apple operates to find a company that wouldn't fit that description (Valve?)
But that misses the point -- the point is that Apple has SOME existing organizational structure around "selling consumer electronics," and that an Apple-purchased Occulus would likely fall into that structure. I don't think there's any evidence of a company that Apple bought and let run on its own for an extended period of time, is there?
I have generally seen definitions of functional units being responsible for a function, without reference to profit or loss. Business units generally refer to a notionally divisible unit from which income, expenses, and thus profits can be measured. By this definition, Apple has only one business unit, the entire enterprise.
Again, this doesn't detract from your point, it amplifies it! Apple really would never preserve a purchased business and leave it independent. It doesn't even have business units, the structure that might, if you're naive, allow for such a thing!
An interesting discussion of Apple's functional structure:
http://stratechery.com/2013/the-uncanny-valley-of-a-function...
As sad as it sounds, thats what makes business in America
The two really don't have anything to do with each other. There's no rule saying that if someone comes out winning in business deal, then everyone comes out winning in that business deal.
Let's wait a while before making such bold statements, shall we? It may have been the best thing that could happen to Instagram, but decent technology (good enough to attract John Carmack) might have had a brighter future without a new owner with possibly different interests.
Why couldn't Oculus have been it's own company?
Facebook made it without a partner.
It seems to be ignored but the massive pockets, infrastructure, and engineering at FB will allow Occulus to have access to much much more than they could have achieved previously.
For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week. I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR.
Glad to see Carmack is still being Carmack.
EDIT: By the way, if anyone is wondering why people are having a negative reaction to this Facebook deal, I think one way to understand it is to watch this video fullscreen and try to imagine any way that Facebook could add to the experience, or at least not detract from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGZc0Dd9Hc#t=5s
It's hard to.
That's supposing Facebook knows how to scale production of electronic items... apart from the cash, they have no relevant experience about that. If it had been Google or Microsoft there would already be people who know how to make it scale to mass production.
Well I have worked in companies making physical goods (shipping millions every year), and you just don't buy a team from one day to another. It's not just about production, it's about supply chain, it's about quality management and quality assurance, regulations for sale in different countries/states, market research, product qualification to improve the design, actual customer support, vendors, distribution, etc...
It's a whole new area of skills/functions you don't have, and that does not mix very well with a software-only company mentality. I think it's going to be very tough for them to make something solid with Facebook.
EDIT: They would have been better prepared for scaling with a company like Apple (whose main business is already making hardware), Microsoft or Google for that matter. Many people say Valve could have been a good choice, but Valve has said several times they don't want to go into the hardware business (and won't make Steam boxes themselves).
Made in China, as far as I can find out. They don't make hardware any more than Apple does.
The point is that, while Facebook may be able to do hardware, servers is not a good example.
Disclosure: my team at Sanmina has been responsible for delivering the test automation & integration software for the rack assembly & test operation for Facebook.
For that matter, Google itself doesn't build anything at scale, either. Why would they? They outsource all their high-vol manufacturing to the same EMS companies everyone else uses (Quanta, Compal, Foxconn, Flextronics, Sanmina, Celestica, Jabil, Pegatron, Benchmark, Plexus and a handful of others).
Think of it as similar to the scaling challenges of MMORPGs. Only much worse.
EDIT: By "giant MMO" I mean "metaverse from Snowcrash," not "video game."
I don't know exactly what Oculus's plan was but it'd be foolish to ignore this obvious application, and that certainly seems to be where Mark Zuckerberg sees the value in it, if we are to take his speech on the conference call at face value.
Zuck probably has some tricks up his sleeve to accomplish this goal. And he's been able to learn from G+ about how not to go about it.
Whether the Metaverse is cool will make or break its popularity. It's what made Facebook's.
The coming years are going to be pretty interesting.
Now, that old LAMP Apache+mpm_worker setup, that one was bad.
They have a lot of XP in building real physical shit these days.
Scaling traffic is a non-issue for them.
Also worth noting, the head of OCP left Facebook today. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2111680/open-compute-project-...
My point is that they are not strangers to manufacturing tech...
Facebook phone, anyone?
There's a world of difference between a potential item, like the FB phone and an actual, demonstrated item, like the Oculus Rift, so they might get some points there.
But their record ATM is non-existent, AFAIK.
Since when was OculusVR supposed to build the metaverse? I thought they only wanted to build the tools to access it.
Facebook-type users are a decade or more away from VR. They don't "do" fiddly interfaces and rough edges. Even if the hardware was there, the usability isn't.
In both cases there are potentially large payoffs in the long term. But they're extremely high price tags for decade-plus plays in which the acquired company has little to no particular proprietary technological edge.
ah.. 1 minute? I thought there was 1 month old tweet that mentioned FB (and obviously overlooked)
If you're gonna spend $2B to buy something you want, better if you can get someone else to foot the bill.
It's the investors who will get a lot of Facebook's money. Also, Facebook's stock dropped yesterday in reaction to the move and it's being reported that the deal is worth $200 million less as a result. [3]
The B round investors held it for such a short time it's almost like they flipped it to Facebook.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift
[2] http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/12/oculus-vr-raises-75m-from-...
[3] http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/03/26/facebook-sha...
This is not a "deal". Facebook will own the company and can (rightfully) be expected to do whatever they want with it.
It happens so often many of us just laugh if not smirk the whole time we watch the familiar process play itself out. Eventually they learn they are not the center of the universe.
In any case, if making awesome VR a reality was Oculus' vision, they can make a pretty good case for that vision being well served by the resources of Facebook.
At the end of the day, what are people afraid of? That the newest action games won't be playable on Rift? I just don't see how people figure Facebook might ruin this product.
That said, I personally don't know if Facebook is going to mess up Oculus. I imagine that what people are worried about is that Facebook will push for Oculus to be used for social VR and will largely ignore games. VR gaming requires high quality sensory experience in a dynamic environment with fast player movements. Social VR is probably going to be way, way more static, (but will have other demands like monitoring body position, face scanning, etc.)
To make the product valuable, it has to be a good platform which other companies can use.
Facebook has ruined many companies that relied on the facebook api to build their businesses. Sometimes facebook reimplemented someones else idea and then remove features from the api to kill the original company.
Making a product based on the Oculus rift platform is a high risk operation. Facebook has already ruined the trust.
Or, yeah, angst.
The core services sure but why wouldn't it be like FB in general(full of third party apps and games)?
There's a reason people only integrate with FB to try and take traffic, and even then they become the customer paying for ads. It's not worth your time.
I have the DK1, and I ordered the DK2 not even a week ago, I've been active in tinkering with Oculus for a while now and even did some Twitch.tv casts of BF3, DayZ, etc. and other games running through TriDef or VorpX. I'm about to start working on a project allowing MS Kinect usage to be broadcast in an Oculus compatible format for web consumption by Oculus users. So I'm pretty "in touch" with the tech at this point.
I see this move as FB ensuring a healthy portfolio and healthy future stock price for their investors by getting the jump on patents and technology of a sure fire success emerging market. I don't think you'll have 3D oculus web cam video calls or friend requests popping up in your flight sim, that's just rampant and misguided speculation.
If I had a choice about WHO bought Oculus the top of the list would be Valve. They already have Carmack, having Newell in the mix would be amazing and ensure the tech was in good hands. Facebook or Google would be next in line, and waaaaay down at the bottom of the list would be Sony, Microsoft, or EA (I would burn the hardware and pretend it never existed if EA bought it).
tl;dr The entire community is acting like a bunch of idiots, stop it, you're embarrassing yourselves and showing your business management ignorance. If I was a company that made it big in the social boom and IPO'd but was facing a shrinking userbase on my life blood product, you better bet your ass I'd utilize my resources to diversify my business. Keeping your all your eggs in a single basket is a historically bad idea.
edit: also based on these comments people think Oculus offers software... they don't, you don't play an Oculus VR MMORPG... they provide hardware and an SDK, everything else is up to content producers, the scaling crisis would be purely one of hardware manufacturing and distribution and maintaining a very widely used SDK. Which I would consider FB pretty okay at... I won't say good... but okay will suffice, especially considering backwards compatibility for hardware/software of this type isn't a big concern.
I can't help but feel that is the same over-dramatization that people are having with Facebook buying Oculus. People like to think that EA is the devil, but in reality they are a game company and has plenty of resources including very smart people that could assist in bringing Oculus to market at least as well as Facebook.
- Origin requirements
- Online requirements
- SimCity debacle
- buggy release after buggy release
- customer support is... turrible
I could go on and on, I don't even buy their stuff anymore, BF3 is and was the last of their games I plan on owning.
Calling anyone who disagrees with you an idiot and an embarrassment isn't good.
The central issue is that when Facebook begins to lose relevance, Zuck is going to yank the reins on Oculus as hard as possible to ensure Facebook stays relevant. You can see how Google did this with G+/YouTube integration.
VR is in its nascent stages, and Oculus has been synonymous with VR. Now instead of VR having a strong an independent company with Carmack near the helm, "VR" is a subservient division of Facebook.
Whether that turns out to be a good thing, well, time will tell. But to call people "ignorant idiots" for being worried is a little extreme, to say the least.
EDIT: You're also mistaken about this part (as I was):
also based on these comments people think Oculus offers software... they don't, you don't play an Oculus VR MMORPG... they provide hardware and an SDK, everything else is up to content producers, the scaling crisis would be purely one of hardware manufacturing and distribution and maintaining a very widely used SDK
The scaling crisis is software, not hardware. They appear to be planning some kind of Oculus VR MMO based on Carmack's tweets. See here for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7471231
This is exactly what comes to mind. Seeing how Google transformed post Eric Schmidt, makes me consider that even IF Zuck has absolutely all the good intentions of letting Oculus do its own thing, CEOs change, and corporations tend to get worse as they grow older (IMO), for some reason.
It could be all good, Oculus could be a great hit, a wonderful platform, all that everyone hopes. Then comes a new CEO with a grand U-turn vision, pulls the rug from beneath their feet and absoluty sinks the ship.
There's just no security, if Oculus kept control, than great, the company is the product, it depends on it to carry on. But Facebook just has the product, its just a leverage, second grade citizen within the corp.
A question: does Facebook need to only be facebook.com?
After all, there are plenty of examples in other industries of companies doing unrelated things and making a go of it. Consider Hitachi TVs and heavy equipment.
Facebook could launch Facebook Games to coincide with Oculus' consumer launch, providing a Steam-like service to pick up and play VR games, day one. Integration from this standpoint could be as innocuous as "Log in with your Facebook account" along side "Log in with your Google account" or "create an account".
At the end of the day he's a billionaire because he had a viral hit and was ready with a monetization strategy (and had amazingly cheap running costs).
None of this really speaks to his business or technical acumen, and he hasn't exactly done very much lately.
This is not the case of a guy getting lucky in the viral lottery and then running his mouth.
A game that's so dependent on mods for long term appeal and server management shouldn't have to rely on decompiling the .jar and patching classes by hand.
Full disclosure: A year of dealing with a small-population server regularly getting OOM-killed on a 512MB VPS might have made me slightly bitter.
Since January 2013 they've spent almost the whole time on optimizing the performance.
And the only features they've implemented since where features people wanted really badly or features which came automatically – for example, after adding support for translucent objects they were able to add stained glass with just some few lines of code.
He has proven the exact opposite. He made a clone of an existing game, failed to deliver on almost everything he promised the people buying it, and then walked away from it leaving it to be never finished by someone else.
>This is not the case of a guy getting lucky in the viral lottery and then running his mouth.
Yes, that is exactly what it is.
I also noted that you did not mentioned which game he supposedly cloned. I noted that because when people say these things (whether minecraft or flappy bird or 2048) and I checked the other game, it usually turned out they provide very different experience.
[1] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecr...
Notch isn't even close to being a billionaire; he's a multimillionaire.
I'm guessing that pretty much sums up the reaction of everyone who backed the initial kickstarter. Sounds like a serious lapse of "dance with the one who brung ya" to me.
In the absence of laws or codified rules we should expect to fall back on manners. What Oculus did feels bad because its rude. At the very least, they should recognize that they are in uncharted territory. A bunch of random strangers gave them gifts because they believed in the vision. If that vision turns into a multi-billion dollar payday, they might consider giving a few gifts back to those kind strangers. Its not like they don't have a list of them all with contact info and everything. It would be polite to do so.
If I meet someone on the street that promises me to try out some new idea and I give them money the courts aren't going to give me any more credence than someone who handed a $50 bill to a bum. How is this in any way a new and novel legal situation?
The only thing that's new is that now due to the Internet more people have the ability to easily give out their money to potentially stupid initiatives.
So why do you think you have any rights beyond someone who's donating money to a cause that may never pan out?
It's perfectly fine to fund something through Kickstarter, but for some reason it seems that some people doing it think they're entering into a deal that isn't really there.
Generally when you give money through Kickstarter you're giving it away without any string attached, only if the company pans out might you actually get some small gift, not a share of the profit.
What's so hard to understand about that? The model's fine. The problem is that for some reason people donating to it think of themselves as shareholders, not donors.
What the person is trying to get across is that in any financial transaction there are non-legal aspects involved. There are human relationships. The world runs on favors as much as it runs on contracts. No single transaction stands alone: you have a personal reputation based on your actions and ethics dictate what other people are going to think of you. If someone gives you a deal on favorable terms, it's generally understood that you will remember that and act accordingly in the future.
It's not specifically outlined and it's not a hard rule, but in general, when people donate to a kickstarter they are doing so under the assumption that the person receiving that money is going to act in a way that doesn't undermine their trust. Turning around and selling your company to Facebook leaves a bad taste in peoples' mouths, since the company was built on the money they donated to make it possible. Do they have a legal right to compensation? Of course not. Do they have a right to be emotionally hurt by this? Sure, and it's not unjustified.
If you didn't chip in ten grand of seed money for that purpose why didn't you make that part of the deal then?
There are no non-legal aspects of financial transactions. When you give someone money they're going to try to retain that money and not give it back to you to the best of their legal ability. There really isn't a non-legal aspect involved in it unless you're a sucker who's willing to get screwed over.
Who cares about the value of their reputation when they've been bought by Facebook for some undisclosed value? Surely that's worth more to them than their reputation, seeing as they now have enough money to never work again with the people who'd care about their reputation.
> There are no non-legal aspects of financial transactions. When you give someone money they're going to try to retain that money and not give it back to you to the best of their legal ability. There really isn't a non-legal aspect involved in it unless you're a sucker who's willing to get screwed over.
This isn't really true, if you plan on doing business for more than one transaction. If you put a poison pill in a contract, guess what, you are blacklisted and can't do any deals in the future because nobody trusts you.
A similar thing is here. People chipped in money with the general expectation that Oculus was not going to sell out on the drop of a hat. It wasn't in the terms obviously but that was the expectation for many people. As such it's pretty much guaranteed for example that Palmer will never be able to do a kickstarter ever again (not that he cares at this point.) But it's a very real consequence, and so even though it was not in the deal in terms of legal consequences it is a very real outcome.
If you look at negotiations and transactions as if they are strictly independent events completely detached from human relationships you're probably a terrible negotiator slash businessperson. It's the difference between law and politics. I'll happily do a deal that isn't exactly a home run for me if I want to be sure I'll have a good relationship with that person for future opportunities.
I'm just saying that people need to learn the hard lesson that when they're "investing" in something like Kickstarter they're not actually "investing" in the general sense. They're making a donation with little or no string attached, at best it's a "you give us money and we send you some doodad in the mail" investment.
So they're effectively donating money with no string attached.
So if you donated money to the company thinking they were going to do X and they actually do Y they can and will fuck you over if they think they can make more money doing Y than they can doing X, accounting for all the alienation from their existing customers from doing not doing X.
So please everyone, if you want to invest in something and you want to have the expectations of an investor make sure you're actually investing, not just donating.
I'd say they are only investing in the general sense, but not the specific one. Because, as we've seen with the Kickstarter failures and flake-outs, regardless of the HN-conventional definition of the word, the donors are certainly and legitimately invested.
KS exchanges ownership in a project's human-level vision (and sometimes a early release of the product) for a donation.
People are like Notch are peeved because Oculus was not upfront when entering this social contract.
Of course nobody should be surprised if that turns out to be a bold-faced lie, but that doesn't mean it's not disappointing.
Sure there are plenty of projects for which the Kickstarter formula is perfectly valid. Funding companies isn't one of them, and that's where most of the money is.
If that stops happening, Kickstarter's may not be enough to keep them afloat.
You could invest in third world governments with interest rates that are too high for their S&P/Moody's/Fitch ratings. Look how revolutionary this idea.
$10,000 should have bought some small amount of equity, even if it was only non-voting and non-dilutable.
That cannot happen with other kickstarter projects that sell a final product like bumper stickers, buttons... In this case, the only difference with a normal purchase is that you buy the product before they manufacture it, so the startup avoids taking risks.
Donating to a Kickstarter may give you some superficial "control" over project direction, but it's a far cry from open source, and it doesn't have the future career impact.
If notch cares about "future career" (see parent posts concerning how much money he's got), donating to cool gaming projects and helping them get off the ground will actually probably earn him money in the long run. Positioning yourself as a benevolent benefactor earns not only good will, but influence. Certainly the 10k wouldn't have hurt when it came time to negotiate for Minecraft for the Oculus.
Kickstarter contributions mean you give your money away to a business without a contractual obligation to receive anything.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine he saw that coming.
Once they did that, any obligation they had to me was filled. Basically, that already danced with me. They're certainly free to move on to the folks with more money now.
So now notch is offended by a company he backed partly with the money he got from people like me, whose hopes of having a fully moddable open sandbox game made them invest, changing its strategy to allow them to reach a bigger market.
I can directly relate to that, but I cannot say that I sympathize. This is what happens, when you invest in something when it's still in an early stage of finding itself. Bad luck, move on.
I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out', so much as it is that it's uncertain what exactly Facebook is going to want out of the deal. Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company. There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose, so the question becomes what exactly they do want Oculus Rift for.
I assume Notch is worried about those implications. Will Facebook start demanding that every Oculus Rift game have tight Facebook integration? Will Facebook do something strange, like have Facebook wall updates appear in the game world irrespective of whether it fits into the game? If I were a game developer, this'd creep me out too.
I think that's very much the issue.
Seriously, "virtual reality" and "Facebook" are two things I don't want to think about in the same context. The former is an extremely promising piece of technology that can change the way people work, talk and play. The latter is a gigantic online advertising engine. Put them together and there's only one direction virtual reality can go: a new way to advertise to Facebook users (once they "bring virtual reality to everyone" of course. /eyeroll ).
Perhaps Facebook are thinking "What's the one thing that could truly set us apart from all other social media sites, and place a prohibitively high barrier to entry on this otherwise very easy to enter field?", and perhaps the conclusion they've reached is to take social media to the next level, and have it simulate life in virtual reality.
Perhaps Facebook are going to aim to have a FacebookVR some time in the future, where you can meet up with other avatars 'in person' in their virtual reality community?
... Or perhaps this is just a sleazy cash in where they think they can recapture the video-game-enamoured youth market by shoving Facebook into every Oculus Rift game.
I am sure the advertizers would love to create 3d models of their products in this environment. Maybe watch some Ford trucks rumble up the mountain while you watch?
The hard lesson over the coming decade or 2 is going to be that UI design for virtual reality tolerates much less intrusion then a desktop PC.
If you're remotely computer literate and organize your desktop the way you like, it hurts when you lose that and it already feels like an invasion when a program does something you don't want it to.
I suspect transposed to virtual reality, people are going to be even less tolerant of trying to force things on them because the experience is much more intimate.
Perhaps not if that's how you 'grew up with it' (so to speak). If you're clever enough and insert yourself into the system early enough then you get to shape all the 'norms' that will eventually emerge.
A lot of UI paradigms will simply disintegrate against that issue. You'll be able to transpose existing ideas into virtual reality by projecting them onto things which are those abstract interfaces (virtual displays etc.), but you're not going to be able to expect to control how the user moves or interacts.
Facebook can't find a cheap smartphone manufacturer with a homegrown OS to buy, so they go with the next best thing that's also got a screen. I think the VR aspect is accidental/a nice to have.
VR "Presence" cuts both ways.
Yes it massively amplifies virtual experiences but disruption, incongruities and annoyances are amplified to the same or perhaps a greater degree...
Google does this same thing with Android and other pervasive Google platforms and services. Why is Google making a phone? So that you use Google services a lot more than you otherwise would, which gives them the opportunity not only to drive up their search and traffic numbers, but collect a lot of data that is useful in targeting advertisements.
I agree that it's hard to think of any product tie-in with FB's extant line that wouldn't be disgusting. The only safe way to think of it is as a portfolio piece -- Facebook just wants to be associated with the next revolutionary name in computer input technology. It's hard to believe that it is so innocuous, though, and Zuck seems to put that idea to bed in his announcement.
The better people get at ignoring ads, the more effort you have to put into getting people to see them if your business is built around them. You can get into a bad feedback cycle where people try ever-harder to ignore your ads as you try ever-harder to make them un-ignorable.
Um, that is also what Facebook did. Maybe not for work but definitely for communication and play.
And if you read the announcement you would know where FB wants to go with VR. Since neither WhatsApp nor Instagram require you to log in with your FB account, I doubt the first thing you'd see after putting on the Rift would be a FB login page.
One kind of social events is gaming with friends. It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.
Undoubtedly at some point virtual reality is going to become the next "smartphone". Rift is a giant headset but in a decade or two it will get so small that we can enjoy virtual reality at home like we enjoy using a smartphone.
This feels more and more like getting your virtual character in SIMs to play virtual reality game.
I've never understood this mindset in gaming. Maybe I'm just showing myself as an introverted curmudgeon, but I only game when I'm not programming, and I just game to try to unwind. Being forced to do something 'social' when I just want to relax is just annoying to me personally.
I'm not saying I hate other people (I do), or that I don't want to ever be social (I don't), but social situations -- while often fun -- do require more mental energy than just shooting bad guys, or scoring goals, or whatever else the game has you doing.
Maybe I'm very unrepresentative of the gaming market at large, but I don't understand why numerous gaming companies (Sony and Microsoft have both headed down this path) want to cram social aspects into games. I'm not sure what they think the business case for that decision is. I assume they think it'll make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love, but that just makes me want to play games less.
Watch a live stream of Scott Manley having some beers and flying some kerbals to the Mun? Sure, I'm on board with that.
Receive a notification that my mother has topped her previous high score in [who cares]Ville? No. No not at all.
I've seen absolutely no indication that Facebook understands that "social gaming" should not mean "annoying your friends".
Not to mention, what is the context of this discussion? Rift. What does Rift have to do with [shit]Ville spam games? Fuck all.
make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love
Certainly. For example, friend quizzes on Facebook.
I don't know what game makes sense to people. I try to be open-minded and play as many type genres as possible, whether it is FPS, MMRPG or puzzles. Disclaimer: I love minecraft.
I imagine they might push social VR games similar to Google's Ingress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_%28game%29) further. This seems to be an increasing trend. I just read about NYC's Easter Egg hunt last week (http://www.easteregghuntsandevents.org/NY_Easter.php). Similar to Verizon's finding smartphone around the country and Ingress. Scavenger hunt, basically.
The only problem with my social network is that most people in my FB circle don't play games. Even if they do they don't play the games I play... That's always an unsolvable problem. Another problem is I don't want to download a 10GB game. We'd have to wait for super-awesome-cloud-gaming-infrastructure to deliver that to us. We are still early in that direction.
Long term relationship because gaming can only happen at slow social speeds rather than fast individual speeds. That means more milking subscription money out.
Playing thru the Halflife story / drama with your friends sounds superficially interesting. Then you realize you can only go as fast as your slowest friends. Then you realize they want $15/month for six months while it plays out for everyone. Um, no thanks.
Facebook gets their hands in the less-casual game industry and also gains control over a platform for virtual experiences, I can see many reasons why Facebook would support continuing to build the Oculus for its originally intended purpose.
At least it's not Microsoft.
Yeah, but I think this is what people like Notch fear, because it's not going to be of any use to just have their logo emblazoned on the device: they're going to want something more from it.
Given the way that they and Zynga worked together to drive casual gaming into the dirt, I'd actually rather Microsoft bought the device than them, because at least Microsoft have a major games wing which would benefit solely from using this device for its intended purpose (albeit by locking the device to Windows and Xbox exclusively).
Facebook acquiring Oculus doesn't just creep me out, it also means the platform will fail. They don't have the experience, and developers won't be lenient with their failures.
Which is what, exactly? I always thought the "killer app" of true VR would be socialization and collaboration: a "virtual world" in the sense of Second Life, OpenCobalt, or Neal Stephenson's metaverse.
Facebook itself is the "casual" version of a socialization system. Facebook's biggest uncaptured market right now is people who prefer to socialize in a more "hardcore" fashion: in virtual worlds (e.g. MMO game-worlds) rather than on websites.
Facebook could probably capture some of this market by putting out the world's first massively-multiuser VR world. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a game, per se, although games could be built on top of it. Just a place, like Facebook itself is a place.
Now, one of the interesting things about VR is that, provided your perspective is attached to an avatar, the only sensible place to put the "camera" is staring right out of the eyes of that avatar. This means that, whenever you're among other players in a shared VR environment, you're going to be constantly staring at up-close views of other people's avatars' faces, who are in turn staring back at you. So, if your VR equipment could read your facial cues, and replicate them on your avatar's face...
Basically: what are the advantages, over using Skype, of having meetings in a physical office? A VR office should be able to replicate those advantages.
2. Modern graphics technology has all it needs to generate realistic expressions on characters. Modern video-game characters instead look creepy because they're replaying a small pre-made library of expressions that don't usually fit the situation very well. If the character's face just mimicked the tension in the muscles of your own face moment-to-moment, this problem would disappear.
3. The argument that facial expressions (or body-language in general) doesn't add value is refuted explicitly by the fact that people prefer meeting in person, to meeting over video-chat, to speaking over the phone, to having a text conversation. The only thing each rung of that ladder adds to the previous is body-language-based interaction.
But these are all beside the greater point: the feeling of being in the same room with someone is necessary for the emotional regulation of your relationship with them. Skype doesn't give you that. VR, eventually, can.
To be able to interact with the world while talking to someone (because that's the reason you're in a virtual world rather than on Skype), you need to be able to see things going on around the person while focusing on them. So, you either need a grid of nine monitors, or this thing[1].
And you still can't have a natural conversation with more than one person (or especially express any status-regulation emotions involving looking at one person in preference to another) because tilting your head means you can't see the "central vision" part of your screen-wall any more.
If only there was some way for tilting or moving your head to just show you more of the virtual people and world around you, in a naturally-mapped way, you know?
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/illumiroom/
When Google enters a brand new market, they seem aware and empathetic that the public might be confused as to why Google has made a step in that direction.
An example is Android "expanding" to the wearables market: http://developer.android.com/wear/index.html They relate the new market to what they can relate with. It's "for your existing Android apps" and adding more functionality "to your users".
What is Facebook's grand vision? Why should gaming companies not retreat from this announcement?
So what? What were you guys thinking back when Google was purely an Internet/search engine company, and tried to foray into other ventures (Android, self-driving cars, etc)?
Companies expand their markets, create new products. It is natural. Why does the Oculus acquisition seem to perplex the HN crowd?
Your example of another Google "venture" is, at this point, vaporware. Now we are told that Facebook is moving into a new "venture"? Why are we to believe that this will be any less vaporware? The only thing that matters to us, the potential consumer, is if they can ship. Everything else is irrelevant.
> Mojang's Notch was more direct in a tweet. "We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus," he said. "I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out."
> We reached out for further comment, and he clarified his position. "Well, VR has huge potential in many fields, including social. I can see why Facebook would want to get in to this," he told Polygon. "As a game developer, however, I don't ever want to get stuck trying to target a platform not focused on games. People have made this mistake before."
I admire Notch standing up for what he believes in, but I just can't see how Facebook is creepier than anything else or affects the acquisition of Oculus. It's not like the gaming device is going to give Facebook any extra information it most likely doesn't already have on you.
It is also a known fact that Amazon are trying to move into the gaming space, as are others and what better way to move into a space that is largely undominated than buying the Oculus? If Facebook didn't buy Oculus, someone else would have, maybe Google or Amazon.
People keep iterating the statement, "But Facebook aren't a games company" which reminds me of a few years ago when people (especially Steve Balmer) were saying that Apple isn't a phone company and won't gain any market share.
Facebook have the funds, talent and workforce to go into any area they choose. Look at Google, what did they know about clean energy, driver-less car tech, cloud infrastructure hosting when they started? Nothing. And now look at them, through various acquisitions and talent hires, Google have become an empire and this is what Facebook are doing: building an empire.
Through previous acquisitions Facebook have proven that they leave them mostly untouched. Besides tighter integration with Facebook, what has changed in Instagram since it was acquired by Facebook? Nothing.
If anything, this is great for Oculus, because it means they won't have to repeatedly seek VC capital every time they want to iterate and improve the product: we the consumer win out of this.
The backlash is unwarranted and ridiculous in my opinion. People complaining over nothing.
Besides tighter integration with Facebook, what has changed in Instagram since it was acquired by Facebook? Nothing.
You just pointed out exactly what changed with Instagram, and what everyone is afraid of changing with the Oculus.
"Log in to your Facebook account to continue playing."
Look at Facebook's commercials, the ones where the person is on the phone reading about some random bullshit while they are at a dinner table with their family. Facebook wears their shallow view of human interaction on their sleeve: stupid interactions with your "friends" (ie, people you don't really see often in real life) are held up as some paragon of human communication. You don't discuss deep ideas on Facebook. You don't find information and increase human knowledge through Facebook. You don't experience new things or communicate with people outside of your comfort zone through Facebook.
Zuck gets on stage and talks about this world of global connections, and articulates this sweeping vision of a utopia where your whole life is enhanced by Facebook, but what we actually get are cat photos, fake cows, and people yukking it up about celebrity buzzfeed articles.
VR stands out as the tech with the most exciting potential of anything right now, and one that could be something that is driven by the entire community's imagination. Like the web was. The fear is that Facebook will devote its massive engineering resources towards applications of VR that are interesting and fun to 18 year olds trying to get laid, but on the whole not transformative for society in the way VR has the potential to be.
So fundamentally there are two questions. First, is Oculus going to have the latitude to grow its culture the way it was on track to, one which was centralized on applying VR in every way possible. On this front there is reason to be skeptical. The second question is if the environment for developing applications for VR is going to be an open, organic ecosystem despite the hardware provider being Facebook. This seems pretty unknowable, there isn't really a suitable analogy here. If VR takes off there very well could be entire platforms built for it, that recreate the computing experience as a whole. The fear is that this platform may very well be owned by Facebook, and will severely limit the latitude with which people can build experiences for VR.
Have you ever considered that this may not be Zuck's fault and that, in fact, this may actually be what the connected world he talks about actually wants?
Do you want Facebook to somehow force the world to become not just more connected but more enlightened? Are we to be cut off from facebook if we post one too many cat photos or stupid chain letter memes? Is that a power we really want anyone to have?
For one, there's no accounting for taste, and two, why can't it just be creepy along with the other creepy things out there, and not even bother with ranking them? It's just as easy to avoid creepy companies, period.
Apple? Valve? Pretty much any company where their primary way of making money isn't dependent on collecting and feeding off their users data.
Thems is not the breaks, fortunately. Boycott software and services from companies that don't respect your privacy. You want to influence the policy of these mega corporations? Vote with your choice of products.
from a Reddit comment
"Tragic that all of the great ideas of our time get swallowed by soulless web companies that lack vision and only care about spying on us."
I really, really don't understand the pathological and irrational hate for Facebook and/or ads.
Just look at Facebook's past relations with developers in their ecosystem, that should fix it.
More facebook in the lives of everybody = road to dystopia.
Unless of course, you think privacy is bullshit. Then I'd recommend a book on European history (1850 to now).
It's not surprising that people who care personally about Oculus would not be happy with the Facebook acquisition. Especially since the gaming community has a very strong aversion to the toxic social gaming landscape that Facebook was/is host to.
I really believe people will change their mind about Facebook now that Facebook is not just the social network but also Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus.
What?
That being said, Oculus owned by Facebook is a different sort of animal than independent Oculus. Previously, they had to sell the public on a $2-300 VR gaming headset or die. Now they have a lot more wiggle room. Personally, I feel more comfortable working with companies that have as much skin as I do in the game. I understand why the shift would unsettle people.
Uh. I think I'd rather pay $1000 than do that.
How would you feel if SpaceX, if you invested in it's technology, would have been bought by John Deere? This is more tragic than the acquisition of Bell Labs by Alcatel.
The community raised $2.5 million, which (in part) enabled Oculus to build the first round of prototypes. That's great. I'm sure that the Kickstarter money was burned through a long, long time ago. And as far as I know, Oculus has delivered on every backer reward it offered. So backers got to do two things: they got the rewards they were promised, and they got to support Oculus' growth -- as far as I know, that is exactly the premise of Kickstarter.
So now Oculus has grown, and as Notch himself says:
"They had fixed all the major issues, and all that remained was huge design and software implementation challenges."
Huge challenges. Including scaling up from building limited quantities of developer kits to trying to mass produce consumer hardware. Oculus was helped to get to this point by Kickstarter money, but that money wasn't going to get them any further, and there's still a very large gap between where Oculus is now and where they (and their backers) want them to be.
Do I trust Facebook? No. Would I trust Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Apple? Not really. But I don't need to trust; I can simply wait and see what Oculus does with the money Facebook is giving it, and see what Facebook expects of Oculus in return. It COULD be bad. Or it COULD help Oculus grow. But the feeling of betrayal by the Kickstarter backers seems to me misplaced; you paid money to help Oculus grow and succeed, and they have.
Facebook doesn't have any of that: all it has is money, which I am certain that Oculus wouldn't have any trouble raising on its own.
Source: a family member works for one, and is in China right now, producing headphones for Dr. Dre.
Really disappointed in the Occulus Rift board right now. I guess money overrides any sort of values.
(Sorry, had to do it. I accept the inevitable downvotes as long as I make one person smile)
This I assume counts as such a liquidity event. He must be a bit conflicted. He gets to restart his pet company, but facebook.
I'm only half kidding.
-@notch on twitter.
That being said - I am truly thankful that he is taking a stand, I certainly hope others will follow. Either way, Zuckerberg will learn his lesson; you do not fuck up a crowd-funded project.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/01/minecrafts-notch-on-earnin...
Oculus took roughly as much in VC as Notch made in 2012, and they didn't even get to the point of selling a real product before they sold to Facebook.
Oculus raised $75M after their Kickstarter. Crowd-funding was a stepping stone.
And it remains to be seen whether Facebook "fucks it up" or turns it into something amazing look Google did with Android.
(1) Requirement of a Google account (i.e. forced correlation of your phone with youtube, google searches, google analytics, google ... ), (2) Ever checked those privileges on the default applications - that you can't disable or remove? Why are those closed-source by the way?, (3) Search the web for more examples.
Either way, I agree that I made an assumption - but - this is kinda related: http://bgr.com/2014/03/06/facebook-android-app-permissions/
Crowd funding is not only about money. Your funders also invest emotions into the project. I am mad, I think others will be as well. To quote Notch[1]: "And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."
[1] http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
He did provide a better explanation to one of the gaming sites, talking about how he doesn't want to put time into a platform that won't be gaming focused, but we have no indication of that happening.
So you lose out on an audience of 1.2Bn people for Minecraft and comment on the situation on Twitter -- a social network that does pretty much all the same things Facebook does.
He already tweeted about the news and RT some stuff, but no word on his plans yet.
Actually, that is exactly what he did, and I'm somewhat surprised that folks didn't see this coming. If not FB, then it would have been one of the other large and evil (hi, Google!) tech companies.
The thing that makes me sad is that it wasn't one of the 'old media' companies, seeking to update their offerings for a new generation of customers.
I suppose Notch is still majority shareholder, but this is the type of thing I expect the leader of the company to say.
Imagine if Mojang decided to do differently than what Notch wanted here and ended up porting Minecraft to Oculus despite Notch's protests. What an interesting story that would be!
I'm beginning to feel the same way about participating in Kickstarter.
[0] http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
Edit: beyond the obvious monetary incentive, which I'm not sure was that much of an incentive since hordes of people seemed ready and willing to throw money at the oculus rift. 2 billion sounds like a bargain right now.
The Sony morpheus system is already better than oculus feature wise, with better position tracking, and accessory tracking as well. And don't under estimate that, I've read some pretty strong "never again" comments from people using VR headsets and loosing grip of the controls and floundering and/or having to take the headset off to get the controls back into there grips again... even just moving your hand on the keyboard is apparently quite annoying.
Essentially without backing they will loose all market capabilities and be relegated to experimental hardware and not a mass market device.
Being brought out by other companies probably wouldn't of been a reality. MS probably have there own tech and wouldn't gain much more than branding... and xbox is a stronger brand anyway... and Valve would no doubt have chosen to partner rather than buy out... so waving $2bil in your face and the guarantee of ongoing funding and launch platform... its a no brainer.
That says a lot.
Facebook buys Oculus Rift, Minecraft creator cancels talks, creeped out.
Feels like that Facebook brand has taken a hit or two with all the privacy violations, huh?
It's about Facebook's brand.
There are many things Facebook might want to do, but it can't, because people don't trust them, and their every movie is a potential cause for outrage.
No company wants to be left with the only alternative of buying their way into success, and as you see this doesn't work quite smooth, either.
These are people who don't really follow developments in the tech sector and use computers as 'iPads with a mouse and keyboard'. The ones who generally shrug at revelations of surveillance and the dangers that come with too much of it.
It will be interesting to see what kind of impact this has on Facebook long-term, if any.
On another note, I was so looking forward to Minecraft on Oculus. I sincerely hope that Valve picks up the torch here.
Disappointed in Notch. I guess he's just a game designer at the end of the day, not an activist, so I guess meh.
Oculus is hardware, hopefully Facebooks billions will bring forward adoption, reduce hardware dev times and create some crappy software that people can chose not to use.
How this can been seen as a bad thing, boggles my mind.
I want VR decades ago. At least Facebooks billions might make the current timeline somewhat bearable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environm...
Which is about the same time PC graphics were picking up, and games like Descent came into existence.
So, like GP, I agree that widespread VR has been overdue for a long time.
What does maturity even mean in a capitalist system? All hail the philosopher entrepreneur? Give me a break.