Hacker News Reader

Comment by xpose2000 | Hacker News Reader

xpose2000

I can see the avalanche of negativity coming, and I understand why. However, I don't think we should automatically assume it's a negative thing like Notch did.

Facebook can try to ensure that the games are geared towards social interactivity that benefits their platform, but in the end, the developers truly pick the direction. Anyone can buy a dev kit and see what they can build with it.

Maybe Facebook wants Oculus Rift to operate as a completely separate entity outside their core business. Maybe it's something they believe in and want to expand into a new genre. Mark has some interesting insights on where to take it: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/1010131905052397.

Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.

View on HN

"Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't."

All of Halo series would be on PC.

It was originally a Mac title!

AFAIK Mac is a type of Personal Computer. As long as games would not be locked to console with joystick being only option I would be happy.

Not exclusively. While Bungie was primarily a Mac developer, and Halo was announced at a Macworld, it was always going to be released for Mac and Windows.

It'd probably still be an RTS and likely never become popular. There might never have been a second Halo.

I thought Bungie gave up on the RTS concept and made it a shooter before Microsoft purchased them.

I haven't heard that, but I don't remember much about Halo at that time. I do remember when Halo RTS was revealed, Bungie was talking about how they were sick of FPS games after Marathon and wanted to do an RTS.

Just checked wikipedia. Bungie changed from an RTS to a "third-person action game" before Microsoft came in. Microsoft changed it to an FPS.

When was Halo a RTS?

Remember that one of Bungie's flagship titles was an RTS series called "Myth". Bungie before that had made a proto-Halo FPS series called "Marathon".

When they made Halo, they made a pretty good architecture for showing wide landscapes/buildings/vehicles and large-enough numbers of troops onscreen at once. During the alpha experimentation with the game, apparently they seriously took a look at using this to make an RTS (albeit one really outside of the usual starcraft mold), rather than a FPS.

see here MrScruff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vTDwW3H5Jw

Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.

We might have gotten a non-crappy Myth III.

> Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.

Maybe Sega would have released the Dreamcast 2...

Exactly, everybody is trashing the acquisition for no reasons. I feel like I'm the only one actually happy for Oculus that facebook bought them. Now people around me are gonna hear about Oculus, VR was going to be something big, but with facebook to back them? It's going to be the next big thing.

I think people have reasons. I think their hesitance in relation to Facebook is not completely unwarranted. Mostly people are exaggerating anything I'm worried about, but, hardware owned by non-hardware companies is often tied into software platforms in really damn annoying ways.

To me that would be a legitimate concern with any non-hardware company purchase of a hardware company.

> I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.

Interesting how it all boils down to trust. You could think of all kinds of amazing possibilities, but if you don't trust them, it's 100% off.

> Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.

Kinect would have been developed independently and be sold the same way the leap motion controller is sold today, and console and game makers would have licensed it instead. Not so bad I think.

> Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't

Call of Duty and the FPS genre would not have been ruined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com