Oculus and the Rift are (probably) dead | Hacker News Reader

Oculus and the Rift are (probably) dead

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Loyalty lost is rarely regained. Now they’ll have to work twice as hard to remain credible in the industry

This happened to the OLPC. It was the darling of open-source fans who were scrambling over each other to write free software for it, who would nearly fight each other to play with it at conferences, attracted by its open-to-all ethos. Then they did the deal with MS ("for the children") and the buzz almost literally disappeared overnight. The army of developers willing to create content for free for the machine disappeared.

And when the buzz disappeared, the tech blogs stopped reporting on it, because no-one in the tech space was interested in it anymore. And the mainstream press was no longer interested because the tech blogs weren't. It was quite educational to watch the nosedive of the OLPC. There were other criticisms causing issues for the OLPC, it wasn't just the loss of tech buzz, but buzz is a major contributor to saleability, as is an active and expansive dev community.

How many hours has it been since the announcment. I hope you save this post and review it in a few years. Perhaps it will give you a moment to ponder over your character.

Edit: To qualify, by character I mean its easy to be critical and negative, perhaps that has a negative effect on ones life or outlook.

There is no need to wait to question the motivations behind an annoucement. Why should there be a 'mourning period' for news, where it wouldn't be appropriate to criticize?

I don't think it's about a grace period or an embargo of the tongue but rather that there's very little information out there about how Oculus will actually be run going forward. Instagram, for example, is basically unchanged since the acquisition (for better or for worse).

Making extreme assessments based on a paucity of information is hasty. It's up to OP to decide when the time has come, but I think grandparent is expressing a reasonable suggestion for additional consideration.

His character? Did you read the post? The author raises some interesting points about the competitiveness of Oculus' latest development hardware in the face of Sony's recent Morpheus product announcement. You have to admit the timing is suspicious.

No, he doesn't make any interesting points at all. He says the latest devkit was a disaster. (Was it?) He says that the sale proves that Oculus has failed utterly and can't compete with Morpheus and they failed to solve the motion problem etc etc. (Wow, we're really confident we know everything about something which just got some press and few people have actually tried, and apparently we can't think of any reason the Oculus shareholders might accept a few billion bucks, no, it must be that they are failing hard and are rats scampering off a sinking ship, we've thought of and carefully dismissed all other possibilities...)

As long as Sony's VR headsets are tied to the PS4 they're probably going to have difficulty competing directly against the consumer Rift. If the example of Facebook and WhatsApp is anything to go by, it seems more likely that Oculus said, "sorry, we're not interested in being acquired ... wait, how much money?"

"Ponder over your character?" That's a little harsh, no?

The guy's entitled to his opinion. While I don't agree with a lot of what he's saying here, he's laid out his reasoning in a fairly coherent and straightforward way. The post hardly comes across as a cheap hit piece, a reactionary diatribe, or a tossed-off conspiracy theory. It's a little early to be making the calls he's making, and I question the bases on which making them. He's wildly speculative in most of his positions. But so are a lot of the posts and comments on this topic; so far, nobody really knows all that much about it. I've seen a lot better commentaries over the last few hours, but I've also seen worse.

"ponder over your character"

What?

This article is littered with half baked, border line conspiracy theories. Worse, it's on the front page of HN. This is probably the reason I frequent other sites a lot more than here now.

It's okay to be against an acquisition, but try to back it up with facts and critical thought.

Facts are not always available to us, especially when there is a lack of information / communication / when we discuss unprovable things like human motivations.

Who knows what the Oculus people are actually thinking? That's why we usually make hypothesis and conjectures: we can't prove it wrong or right, we still think something's fishy. I however agree that the tone of the article sounds too certain.

> A lot of investors and enthusiasts saw Sony’s Morpheus as a potential Rift killer.

So this is going to be an expensive additional add-on for the PS4, that would somehow have killed the Rift? Optional console add-ons rarely gain any traction, and while Sony made a great demo unit, they have plenty of money to make powerful, fancy prototypes. There's no way of knowing what the actual consumer units will be like until they actually create a product out of it.

Oculus started basic and is improving because that's all they could afford to do, given their need to release actual usable, mass produced hardware to backers. Sony started huge, and now they'll see how they can distill that down to a mass-producible item. And that probably won't be for a year or two.

So yeah, they have competition now, but Oculus did not sell because they were afraid of a shiny demo. It's not a product yet, and there's no guarantee that it ever will be.

Why do you assume the product is no good simply because they sold out?

I prefer to look at as they simply didn't have deep enough pockets to go up against the likes of Sony and no doubt Microsoft and Valve in the near future. Being acquired by a giant like Facebook - as distasteful as it may seem at the outset - gives them the capital they need to execute on their vision and not have to worry so much about being buried by the gaming titans.

This was a strategic play to keep Oculus alive, not to kill it dead.

The most interesting part of the article to me was the second to last paragraph.

We've been down this road with VR technology before in the mid-90s. Our enthusiasm is way ahead of anything that's ever been delivered on.

Just to salt the wound a little more, I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k

Just wait a few days and this back lashing will be over.

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