Backlash To Facebook Buying Virtual Reality Firm Comes Swiftly
When Facebook purchases a company, you can often hear a collective groan go around the Internet — "There goes the neighborhood."
The Oculus VR acquisition announced Tuesday is Facebook's first high-profile hardware purchase. A very popular one, too. Since debuting on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter two years ago, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset quickly became the most-talked-about device in gaming.
Virtual reality is so hot that Sony announced its own VR headset — Project Morpheus — last week, and even showed one of the first games made for the Oculus Rift running on Sony hardware: The starfighter simulator EVE: Valkyrie.
Gamers and developers alike have been expecting big things from Oculus, and even speculating about an acquisition — just not by Facebook.
"I'd say I was pretty shocked," said E McNeil, the developer of a virtual reality game called Darknet. His first reaction to news of the Oculus acquisition was pretty common among his fellow developers, he says. "A lot of people were thinking that maybe Microsoft would try to purchase Oculus — or some other gaming company and I guess Facebook is involved in gaming. No one really saw this coming. A lot of people are surprised right now."
Some of that surprise has turned to anger; many of the hundreds of comments on the Oculus blog post announcing the deal can't be read on air. The commenters accuse Oculus of abandoning its grassroots vision, and worry that Oculus headsets will be flooded with Facebook's ads.
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Getting Your Head Into The Facebook-Oculus Virtual Reality Deal