Facebook Purchases Oculus? Why?

As stated in the title, Oculus has been officially bought out by Facebook book for 2 Billion dollars! (Click here if you'd like to know more) Why does Facebook want Oculus? They don't have anything to do with games. Post your reasons why they might below. My theory is just for investment, they simply see potential for the Oculus Rift.

Yet something else promising ruined. It's genuinely disappointing that Facebook did this.

wizeman said:

Why does Facebook want Oculus? They don't have anything to do with games.

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Well, they do have a lot of shitty games that they enjoy capitalizing on. I imagine it'd be mostly that and collecting even more of your personal information that they'd want Oculus Rift.

If they were just investing as you stated, it's more likely that they would have just purchased some stock.

Now I too can enjoy adverts targeted at me in VIRTUAL REALITY

If you think about it a little bit, this happened not too long after Sony came out with their own VR headset, Project Morpheus. Maybe Oculus wanted somebody big to back them so they could go up against Sony? I dunno.

The thing is that they're aiming for completely separate markets, though. Oculus Rift appealed to the PC userbase, while Morpheus was simply for PS4. They're not really competition.

A wider range of hardware than the Oculus is welcomed in this industry anyway, and with Valve having an open standard for communicating with VR headsets laying around, we're going to see a lot more headsets besides the Oculus Rift being fully supported by developers.

Besides, the Oculus was never meant to represent the entire VR medium, as much as the now crashed and heavily burned hype train would lead you to believe. The buyout gave Oculus $400 million in liquid, ($1.6 billion of it is in shares. They own a sizeable chunk of Facebook now.) so we're going to see a consumer version much more quickly, and more affordable than ever.

Regardless of whether executive meddling by Facebook will harm the Rift in any way, most people simply aren't going to trust it one way or another, so Oculus Rift has lost a fair amount of their audience. They knew there was going to be negative backlash joining forces with Facebook over any other company, but Palmer never saw what happened coming.

I know the money is extremely helpful towards the project, but that's what the kickstarter was for in the first place. Burning bridges with Notch and many other devs wasn't such a good idea, in my opinion.

I don't know if any of you know of Jim Sterling but I have to agree with him when he says it's better that Facebook bought it as oppose to some company that makes games.

Again agreeing with him I'd think it be far worse if some company like EA bought the thing.

This development has made me so sad in so very little time.

The VR that Oculus provides is unique and unlike any other in the sense that it achieves an extremely life like view within the games it supports. It replicates a field of view similar to what human eyes are fully capable of seeing, and that alone is amazing. Games already give us many different and wonderful worlds to experience, and something like VR would be the final step to truly feeling like you're actually in that world. I would've loved to experienced things like the vast landscape of Skyrim, or the infinite worlds of Minecraft with my own full vision, but it seems this buyout is threatening that.

Facebook. Of all companies. Sure they are a great source of money, but the fact that they have obvious influence on Oculus VR scares me because they may use it accelerate VR progress on things that don't matter, adverts, VR farmville, VR video calls, etc. And worst of all, I'm already saddened that I may never be able to see the infinite worlds of Minecraft in full VR anymore.


I'm skeptical, but for the sake of VR I'll keep waiting. I shouldn't give up on this dream just yet.

This is reminding me a little too much of the backlash when Disney bought Marvel, and I have a similar response to this.

It's very unlikely that Facebook is going to make huge changes to the way Oculus operates, as well as the audience that it is targeting. That's probably the worst thing they could do actually, they'd risk alienating the entire target audience if this VR tool was turned into an extension of social media. A lot of the horror stories that I'm hearing from people who oppose this change are scared of what could happen. Well, there's a lot of things in this world that could happen. Disney could have turned Marvel properties into ultra kid-friendly shadows of their former self, but for what gain? The people who were already into Marvel would unsubscribe, and they wouldn't attract a new audience because people already have this idea of what they think it is, regardless of whatever Disney could have changed. It'd be suicide for the product if the parent company made sweeping changes to how it operates.

Facebook could turn the Oculus Rift into a social media tool, but what would they gain out of it? There's very little potential. The way I see it, Facebook is simply making an investment with this purchase. They're hoping that it will take off spectacularly, and they'll easily make their money back when the value skyrockets (not going into how likely I think this is).

That said, if Facebook illogically makes the big sweeping changes that everyone is predicting, I'll happily eat my own words. As it stands though, I can't see it happening.

That is definitely a good point, aliening the existing audience would throw that whole investment out the window. That audience is already fractured by the butthurt of the buyout as it is.

I've also been saying there are alternatives to the Rift anyway; it hasn't nor will it monopolize the whole VR medium. I see Facebook making that investment to broaden the applications of VR, and bringing in a much wider audience than PC games. If headsets like the Rift are going to catch on, all of its potential uses are going to have to be capitalized on.

.Luke said:

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I've also been saying there are alternatives to the Rift anyway; it hasn't nor will it monopolize the whole VR medium. I see Facebook making that investment to broaden the applications of VR, and bringing in a much wider audience than PC games. If headsets like the Rift are going to catch on, all of its potential uses are going to have to be capitalized on.

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Which alternatives are you talking about? There's many you can almost instantly rule out. Project Morpheus for instance, being a Sony product, will likely be closed source and PS4 exclusive obviously enough, which can take a huge toll on the amount of VR games available. Other VR technologies that are actually open source however lack a decent API that developers can easily integrate like what Oculus has.

My last post in this topic feels so ignored.

Alternative headsets will pop up, and Valve has their own VR SDK in development. (Don't know what that's like, but Valve's work is usually something you shouldn't shrug off.) So as long as modern vr headsets support Valve's open source API, developers will be less afraid of supporting multiple VR headsets when the bulk of them are speaking the same language.

tl;dr, Oculus Rift isn't the only possibility of an open source headset, and open source SDKs for VR headsets also opens the doors to even more headsets coming into existence. I'm pretty confident the Rift will make it out of this unscathed, but it's not like VR is going to die with it if Facebook pulls any executive meddling.