It would be nice if kickstarter campaigns could add equity as and option in the reward tiers, but it's not like these people gave their money for nothing in return.
People right now currently feel akin to a benefactor who put a kid through college only to have the kid turn their back on them down the road once they're successful.
I don't understand any of your reactions to this. They took money, and so what? For a site that is dedicated to the entrepreneurial spirit, making it big, and "disrupting industries" you sure could have fooled me.
Honestly, it feels that for all the talk about the huge future of VR by Oculus, if they really believed in it, no number would be big enough to get them to give up control of how that future is built. Most entrepreneurs who are in the business of changing the world are not that interested in relinquishing any control to someone else no matter how much that will get them paid.
I'm pretty sure I know what the deal is here, that Facebook basically told them that they can take their investors out of the picture and have the full resources to build the best consumer product they want to with custom hardware. This certainly would sound enticing but the problem is that as soon as the going gets tough that lack of absolute control is going to start to rear its head. Zuck is going to have the final call on everything, and when the VR wars heat up you can be sure he is going to make different decisions than an independent Oculus would.
Palmer doesn't want to run a company, he wants to make VR a thing, and the same goes for Carmack. You have no idea what the terms of the acquisition was, so don't throw around your conjecture about who has the final say on what. Why don't we just wait and see what the outcome is before we go all Harry Caray.
Risk is exactly what investors bear in exchange for a potential return. Companies require investment because they don't have the capital to get things moving upward otherwise, which is exactly the need that Kickstarer fulfills.
The unwritten deal was that the funders were backing a low-overhead, indie organisation.
It's like a pathetic jealousy of wanting to help a homeless as long as you know they are never going to be richer than you.
Often, when companies get big, the motives change from "making a great product" to "milking the user for more money".