For a team of new-comers, without both real engineering experience and real business experience, maybe the consequences of the Facebook acquisition could have went the way you imagine, but lots of the Oculus guys are heavyweights and when someone says something that goes against their vision they need to have solid arguments, and even if their arguments will be right, they need to consider that even throwing those arguments at them comes with a huge real risk (of having a team fracture and a bunch of very smart guys leaving the company) and huge real cost (the real productivity decrease that comes from pushing a team in a direction they don't want to go to, and of wasting the big-brains' time in meetings and arguments instead of product development - these kinds of "productivity penalties" ca very well allow a competitor to come up with a better idea before them!).
But you only have to look back to Doom 3 to see the cracks in that idea. Many design decisions of that game were unpopular when it was released, and over the following years it came out that those decisions were driven by technical aspects of the engine. Where rather than the engine sacrificing for the design, design sacrificed for the engine.
So it'd be easy to make the less immediately appealing argument that they should push back on Carmack's vision when they think it's gone off the rails.
"Carmack has also admitted that the flashlight was not attached to the weapons in the original version of Doom 3 due to performance issues" ... http://www.dsogaming.com/news/john-carmack-speaks-30fps-on-c...
If they're smart, they will allow him pretty much free reign, and then put some resources behind his projects to help them mature. (think Sergey Brin or Andy Rubin at Google)
On top of that, Facebook has shown itself to be untrustworthy many times from a dev and user perspective (beacon, FB credits etc), so if Carmack wants to avoid that and produce something without intrusive advertising for example, they may well clash.
None of this means it was a bad idea to sell for oculus, just that selling is ceding control completely to the vision of the larger company in the long term.
I mean, hacker news likes to freak out about fiduciary duty and "omg, corporations are obligated to make maximum profit." But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.), and there is near-zero legal possibility of minority investors forcing them to. This is because investors have almost no say unless it is obvious you are trying to screw them -- normally a subset of them -- or unless there is no plausible way a course of action could make money.
Engaging in charity and supporting foundations is not related to the "generosity" of the a corporation (who runs it); charity and foundations can be PR and tax-saving strategies.
Drug cartels engage in charitable donations; that doesn't make them generous.
HSBC (just picked a random one) supports charities. It also launders money for the drug cartels and is generally involved in illegal money transactions.
I can pick virtually any big corporation involved in corruption/crime scandals and I'm pretty sure they routinely make charitable acts and/or have their foundations and as well.
I certainly don't say that any corporation is corrupt, but the link with foundation/charities and morality of a corporation just doesn't exist.
- A real state company that helps an organization that seeks to prevent the construction of new buildings (because it destroys the forest/parks) but in reality they just want to keep the price of their own stock as high as possible.
- A clothes company that support anti-fur organisations, only because the rival brand is the target of such protesters.
- An alternate reality where Shell supports anti-Exxon campaigns done by Greenpeace.
At this point, the awesome feature issue isn't even really on the table based on my understanding. Getting the technology to be stable and solving all the issues with it is the main focus. I don't see Facebook getting in the way of that. If that does become an issue, Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going.
This is true. That's exactly why people find it sad.
If this happens even a tiny bit, it will kill the passion in the entire team and Facebook's VR will become a gimmick more like Cue-Cat than a world-changing new platform.
The technical minds should have a fair chunk of leverage here simply because of how much of the capacity to evolve the product in truly exciting ways will reside in their head.
When Facebook owns all the IP? Don't be silly.