At least Project Morpheus is still a thing.

Just change your name to Billy Madison and your avatar to Adam Sandler already.

Nah, I think the tide has turned against Google as well somewhat. All of these plucky internet startups from the last decade are now the monolithic evil corporations they originally fought against, complete with the part where they can sling around money to buy anything and everything that catches their interest.

Also, I love Patrick's method of Facebook purging and will adopt it for myself posthaste.

EDIT: oh right, I should probably comment on the actual story. Patrick is right. Kickstarter isn't an investment, it's a donation. Placing any ownership of the finished product on yourself is disingenuous.

@acleveralias: relevance depends on the employees cut (or lack there of) from the acquisition

I bet you 2 billion dollars that line from Patrick is coming from that stupid Ira Glass video where he says something to the effect of all artists/creators fail before they succeed, so don't lose hope in yourself because if you keep trying, you'll eventually overcome failure.

Really inspiring. Also a bunch of horseshit. There are things people are natural at, and things people will never grasp, even through persistence. There are also people who need to try a lot before they become good.

@bicycle_repairman: Yeah this is an opinion piece though. This isn't a news article anyway though GB should have a separate category to be able to place articles like this one so there won't be people who are going to complain or scrutinize that this is not a news post.

That is a crazy article. The person who wrote that is crazy and so are you if you agree with him. I still remember how to spell necessary because I got it wrong in a spelling bee. I know to make sure to double check that I have the company name right on my cover letters because of the time I sent out that one to a job I really wanted that still had another company's name on it. I know that I have to watch out for that section with mixed pizzicato and arco sections in the finale of Stravinsky's 1st because I've fucked it up so many times.

Jim Sterling just put up a video with a great perspective on the matter.

He makes an excellent point; Facebook has a better track record in not screwing up what it buys than.. pretty much everyone else in the actual game industry. This buyout might be the thing that saved the Oculus from fading into obscure, niche territory.

I have no love of Facebook myself, and I'm sad that the Oculus will be moving away from its grassroots appeal, but this story could have ended so much worse.

@sf2733: he hasn't "invested" anything though. That's literally what's being said in the article. When you back a project on Kickstarter, like Notch did, it's a gift to that person or company. You are owed literally nothing. You are owed zero financial return, physical goods, or ownership shares. It could not be more clear. Notch calling himself an investor in the company is either a fundamental misunderstanding on his part or a self aware artificial inflation of his role.

Man. Patrick is one the best writers on the internet. Great article.

There is no part of that tweet that refers to intelligence at all. He specifically says "Not enough money to properly invest".

If Oculus needs $2 billion to do their work, $300 is barely a drop in the bucket. More than six million people would have to chip in $300 to add up to equivalent funding. Even then, a good chunk of that $300 is going to materials and production of the product and not just the R&D budget if each of them is buying a Rift rather than buying a stake in the company. You simply aren't going to get that kind of funding from the middle class through something like Kickstarter.

The problem with Facebook being the purchaser is - for me - that they make money by selling user data to advertisers. I would feel the same way if it were Google.

Although Facebook and OR can deny it all they want, ultimately, the cash they have spent only makes sense to their investors if this device results in more - more of, more detailed, and more actionable - user data flowing back to Facebook. They won't - because they can't - simply release a high-end VR set and hope it works, as though they were releasing a new set of high-end headphones. Anything that is part of the "Oculus Rift experience" will have to be part of Facebook's data stream.

Do you - as they said publicly - really want Facebook along for the ride when you make a virtual doctor's visit? I don't. Simply put, I want to purchase a high-end VR set that makes my gaming more fun, and I don't want more data flowing to Facebook to support that.

Thanks for the great article @patrickklepek, you really summed it up.

A very good, sane right up. A little apologetic towards Facebook, and a little critical of Notch, but a fair shake.

Personally I'm just looking to Carmack right now.

If he walks away in the next 6 months, I think we can use that as some kind of barometer to what FaceRift will be like.

@veektarius:

I'll just quote something from him:

There is one and only one bit of useful, reliable information you can safely glean from failure: “that didn’t work”. Which is wonderful, because now you know to consider maybe not doing that any more. But that’s all you get in terms of valuable, actionable, safe information.

What good will it do you to know how not to do something correctly?

That article I done dug up

If everyone sticks to their word, then I am all for this.

@tunnelman: I agree with you completely, however, the majority of the anger is about what he thinks ownership by Facebook is going to do to the product and the vision behind the product. To dismiss his view point completely when I'm sure he's much more well informed than any of us (the writer of this article included), AND to basically shame anyone who's skeptical is pathetic and naive. I didn't know it was bad to question things, who knew?

It's a well written article, but I really feel like Patrick missinterpreted the anger. I don't see anybody being angry cause they don't get any money from this, and I probably read most of the NeoGaf Thread.

There are sentences written here, but I'm still confused.

I really enjoyed the write-up. Thanks Patrick !

What makes me so sad is how alienated the general reaction make me feel. I don't distrust Facebook. I'm not quite sure why you would. It's just a company that made a piece of technology that I use. Why distrust FB but not Google? Twitter? Double Fine? Giant Bomb? (or CBS?)

I don't think Notch is a hero "doing the right thing." He seems like an asshole! Publicly flinging shit over supposed slights that haven't even happened yet. If I was in business talks with someone and they announced they were pulling out over Twitter, I'd think they were a jerk! I think it shows massive disrespect and I would personally never want to work with him because he might do stuff like that.

But it seems like I'm in the minority. And that makes me kinda sad and lonely. I'd like to be able to understand where people are coming from.

I agree with the first part, as you get older you start to realize that practical trumps ideal. Practical happens.

But for the second I don't, the backers got exactly what Oculus proposed, dev kits and the chance to see them succeed.

If the Oculus comes out and it turns out that it really does phone home to Facebook with usage information, I expect we'll see it jail-broken within months if not weeks.

You're sentences.

I have never backed a Kickstarter proposal. I have no idea why anyone who did would feel entitled at this point; they got theirs. I'm still deeply disappointed by the Facebook acquisition.

(If we want a recent reason to feel better, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion and seemingly remains unscathed as part of the buyout process.)

Instagram is an entirely different product that does fit with Facebook's current business. It has also certainly changed since the purchase, Instagram Video being the most apparent.

While a massive cash pipe is good for Oculus development now, the sacrifice of control could cause problems later. Facebook business practices are greasy. I don't think they have anything to offer Oculus in the way developers or designers. The site preforms well for the capacity, but has deep struggles with feature creep and user experience. Setting up Facebook is more trouble than setting up a new computer.

I am glad the VR excitement has expanded beyond Oculus, with Sony and others in the running it's not as likely to flop when it hits market.

@sf2733: I think it's fine for him to have his opinion on the whole thing like literally anyone else who has heard of the two companies but self proclaiming himself as an investor is inherently false. If his anger is coming from what he feels he's owed by the company he can just fuck right off. Like I wouldn't care that he said any of the things he said if he didn't call himself an investor in the company. I feel as if he was a potential developer for the product and his knowledge base of it lags behind those currently developing for the platform. Given the quick talks of the deal, made at GDC, I don't feel he's at all qualified any more than any other developer to give thoughts on the issue. I'm not saying he can't or shouldn't have his opinions or even that they're different from mine, I'm just saying he's inflating his importance to the whole thing.

@fargofallout said:

Agreed. Maybe it was inevitable that some larger tech company would get their hands on VR tech and build it into a broader monetized service, but Facebook is the large tech company I trust the least to accomplish this in a humane way. (Okay, maybe Yahoo would be worse.) Even if Facebook doesn't think they'll make money off this for ten years, they still plan on making money eventually, and so far Facebook's overall approach to monetization of their platform doesn't give me confidence in their ability to offer a straightforward value proposition to the end-user. Maybe it's just me being sentimental, but I'd have fewer reservations if we were talking about, say, Amazon -- at least they actually sell things to people, even if they're just as invasive on the back-end. But when you're talking about lesser evils, I guess that gets pretty subjective.

Maybe Facebook will find a new model moving forward, but so far their strengths as a company are in ads and data (and, in the short term, being able to throw money at stuff (case in point)). So it's a fair expectation that, whenever they do make money on VR, how they make money on it will reflect those strengths. And if we're taking it as a given that VR will require this kind of targeted advertisement and user data-mining to be profitable at a large scale, whether from Facebook or anyone else, then that's a big asterisk to tack on the end of the "VR revolution."

Though I still think non-gaming VR will be our generation's multimedia CD-ROM -- a cool tech demo, but something that most people won't ever bother using. So in the long run, who knows.

You're not a monster @patrickklepek. I killed a tortoise today in Far Cry 3-- I'm a monster.

When I first heard about Sonys Project Morpheus VR I immediately thought "Ha, Occulus Ripped" I was quite pleased with myself. i'm sure others have thought it too.

The Occulus Rift was never gonna be more than a cool gimmick device. Same with that song VR thingy.

People aren't going to want to wear goofy headsets.

This whole facebook thing is irrelevant.

Hey look! I can dig up choice quotes too!

If you want to succeed, to become “a success”, to achieve mastery, then you need to fail more times than Joe Blow has tried;

That sounds an awful lot like "success only comes through failure" to me. Note that "through failure" doesn't necessarily mean "from failure" just that success is on the other side of failure.

I'd rather have the niche Oculus and the thousands of independent projects that would have come out for it than a mainstream corporate Second Life viewer with games as a tertiary feature at best. You can all rationalize the sell-out all you want, but it's not pure anymore, and its not worth my passion. To quote Bill HIcks, "I want my rock stars DEAD!"

I completely agree. He has some sort of haughty idea of what he actually did in giving them money. He didn't invest. It was a donation. He can be displeased with what is happening, but announcing something like that over twitter makes him seem petty and demagogues the issue.

I don't distrust Facebook either. On top of that, like Patrick said, they have already had lots of money. So the attachment of the Facebook name is clearly what people don't like about this.

I also find it amusing that Giant bomb literally went through the exact same thing being bought by CBSi. Are there still people moaning over that? No cause nothing changed. Same with instagram that Facebook know owns. People who automatically think this is terrible just seem to be ignorant of facts.

Whenever I see Facebook throwing billions around, I find it crazy how a social site has become such a financial behemoth.

I'm happy for the Oculus guys. During negotiations, it seemed like they wanted the freedom to keep doing what they're doing (like Giant Bomb wanted when signing with CBSi). If they get that, the backing of a company like FB brings its potential sky high. It's exciting.

And to think, just a couple years ago we were reading interviews with Carmack from a back room, with some weird duct-taped device that played Doom III.

He's saying this is an opinion piece as opposed to a news piece. I'm pretty sure that's what you were going for in the first place though.

Then again, when you embrace the title as the "news guy" at Giantbomb, you can't blame your readers to want to view your articles through a news lens. One can call that mismanaged expectations on the part of a variety of actors. Kind of like what this entire article is about, really.

I figured, but I wanted to be sure. I don't follow Mr. Plante, so I have no way of gauging when his text is supposed to have sarcasm.

I wondered if it might be meant like, "Oh, you have enough money for beer, but you don't have enough to put gas in the car?"

I think Patrick is over thinking this too much. It's not so much that Oculus got bought out because we all knew that this was going to happen sooner or later - the problem is that it is Facebook who bought them out. The same company who has managed to fuck up pretty much every single thing they have ever done without fail. That's why people are upset. Nothing more, nothing less.

As far as the whole Kickstarter thing - What did you expect?! Did you really think that the kickstarter funding would be able to lift this off the ground and take it to market? No way in hell. It was pretty obvious that they would need outside investment from a larger company at some point. Anyone who thought otherwise is delusional.

Shoutouts to notch for participating in the doom-and-gloom philosophy of people by being the first dev to pull out of occulus support because of FB. Its just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

RIP

Patrick's mom uses Facebook? My parents have trouble using push button phones.

Hindsight-realists are boring and dumb.

So the thing is, while people who backed this Kickstarter for Oculus are wrong for being pissed about this, I'm glad they are. Kickstarter, as it exists today, is for chumps and the Oculus Rift is the best example yet of why it's for chumps.

Clearly Oculus had the chance to go the VC route or 'angel investor' route before taking their idea to Kickstarter and either were denied or figured Kickstarter was the better option. Either way, Oculus Rift would never have been in the position to be acquired by Facebook without being Kickstarted (and if it had only been funded to the initial $250k they asked for, probably would still not exist). Now, that said, the Oculus Kickstarter proved that crowd sourcing is a viable form of funding things that are more than just niche products but also things that are financially viable as well. Take both those facts together and it becomes clear that a "gamers hedge fund" could do a lot of the good things Kickstarter does while also providing gamers a potential financial benefit from their benevolence. Problem is, why would any schmuck choose that option while free money is available from a bunch of people who have no real recourse if you don't deliver what you promise or if it's shit, and have absolutely no stake in your company if you do one day become profitable and get bought out or become the next billion-dollar IPO.

In short, if you're pissed about not benefiting from the Oculus buyout, don't back stuff on Kickstarter. If you just care about getting the thing itself, don't back stuff on Kickstarter because there's no guarantee you'll get "what you paid for". If you are super-idealistic and don't really care if you get the thing you back but think it would be cool if the thing exists one day and you get one, by all means, continue as you were.

Personally, between stuff like the Oculus buyout, Ouya being a hunk of shit, not to mention the latter selling at retail before some backers got their kits, I continue to feel pretty good in my choice to not back anything on Kickstarter ever. Because it's for chumps.

Failure teaches you to watch out. It attaches a glowing red label to a set of circumstances that makes you think, "Something bad happened here and going on auto-pilot will not serve you. Turn on your brain." That's as valuable a piece of knowledge as any technical know-how in my experience.

@vigil80: Nah, Plante is a pretty nice guy. Also, in a response to a response he elaborated, "The implication is the middle class has money to spend, but is not allowed by law to invest in a company like Oculus" and also "to invest you have to have way more money than what's necessary. You have to have VC. The barrier to entry is so high".

I still don't like it.

The backlash to this takeover isn't baseless. there are legit reasons why people did not react well to suddenly having the words "social platform" forced into their indie virtual reality device by a soulless mega corp.

However I do feel like a lot of the anti-backlash is not sincere. I feel that white-knighting unpopular corporate moves and mergers has become a new form of trolling.

There is a reason why folks feel like large companies are out to exploit them, and that is because it is historically and intrinsically true.

Facebook is suck. Die Facebook.

(hit me up on facebook if you want to argue some more)

well put.

I never understood the reaction about the fact that the rift was a Kickstarter project. Pebble started out as a kickstarter and they used that to start a buisness. I keep expecting them to be bought out by Apple or Google at this point. Oculus was always going to be bought.

Now I don't really like facebook. I see it as a useful tool but it's not my social network of chocie but would people be freaking out as much if Microsoft and Sony had boughtem?

Because anyone that knows how to do something either experienced failure in all the other potential ways first hand, or learned it from people who learned it from people who learned it from people that failed first hand.

You don't find success until you've learned one way or another the other paths are suboptimal. Reinventing the wheel is bad, but inventing the wheel the first time took discovering that all the other shapes sucked for the job.

success ONLY comes through failure, it implies an absolute which just isn't true (also it makes extra less sense in this context)

You're assuming that everything can be reasoned out with the information you do have and knowledge of what not to do (especially with that "turn on your brain" comment). Many things don't work that way.

@patrickklepek: I think what @bicycle_repairman was trying to say is that there's a difference between straightforward news reporting and editorials/opinion pieces. I really liked the article, and I think it'd be a good read even for someone who doesn't share your opinions (I'd even go as far as to say it might convince them that you're right) - but I'd understand if he was taking issue with it being posted in the same general "giantbomb news" section. Is there some "editorial" tag that could be attached to some articles to clarify? (Having said that, there's probably no mistaking this article for a "straight" news article, so I guess the point's sort of academic. Maybe I've just misunderstood what bycicle_repairman was saying altogether...)