i feel a bit bad for john carmack. well i mean he's filthy rich(er) now so not REALLY, but just seems like he's caught in the middle of something he had no intention was going to happen. oh well, hopefully he remains focused and doesn't let it all go to his head.

@luck702: Zenimax isn't Bethesdas publisher, they own the company. If Zenimax goes bankrupt, so does Bethesda

I got you bro.

But the idea behind facebook is that its users all willingly share their own information so your statement doesn't really seem valid. To not support a product that will probably be a turning point in video games for such a reason is really disturbing and its frustrating that you arent the only person who holds such a view

@spraynardtatum:

Something like this then?

http://www.trueplayergear.com/

Here's a detailed interview with the founder:

John Carmack: "Hey, Zenimax guys, glad you can make it out to this luncheon! Oh, where are my manners? Zenimax guys, meet Facebook's lawyers."

Yeah, and I'm willingly not taking part in any of that. Hence why I'm avoiding Oculus. I'm sorry, I consider myself to be a very forward thinking person but I still can't get over how staggering it is how much power Facebook holds.

And yes it will become a turning point in video games, but there will be competition. Most lilkely in the form of the current console makers. I'm holding my hopes out for them. I see no reason at all to support Oculus after they sold to a company like Facebook.

I could be wrong, but I think the argument that Zenimax is making has to do with a clause I have heard is usually in contracts concerning stuff developed by the employee, in this case John Carmack, where the employer has first option or owns depending on how the contract is worded. Now, if the contract is "first dibs" style, Zenimax already blew that chance when they stopped Carmack from developing VR at id Software which caused him to leave and join Oculus VR. The only point of contention I can see with this situation is the 3.5 months between when he joined Oculus VR and when he left id Software, however I find it hard to believe that Carmack wouldn't be smart enough to avoid any potential issues with that situation.

As I said, I could be wrong and that clause never existed in Carmacks contract, or it could have been worded differently, but that's where I could maybe see some legitimacy to Zenimaxs claim. That said, this response by Oculus VR seems to address pretty much every claim Zenimax has made and I don't see Zenimax winning if this does go to court.

@luck702: Bethesda is fully owned by ZeniMax. There is no getting a better publisher.

So the gist of this I suppose is that since Carmack was an employee of Zenimax when he started developing the Rift then Zenimax thinks it has a share of Rift monies. I suppose that may be a legit claim if Carmack didn't read the fine print on his contract.

Isn't it pretty standard that anything you develop at a company belongs to the company?

@polyesterpimp: How is it disturbing that people don't want to willingly give up their person info?

They should have Friend of the Site (TM) Dave Lang write the next press statement.

"Get f****d, ZeniMax!"

EDIT: It's really funny that this is happening, after Carmack released the Doom 3 code and ZeniMax released Doom 3 BFG years later.

Considering Carmack's tweet and Facebook's response, I'm willing to bet that Carmack (being the smart guy that he is) just re-wrote the code that Zenimax may have had claim to. In programming, TMTOWTDI, which would make Carmack/Facebook's claims true while making Zenimax none the wiser, thinking they might have a claim against Facebook.

OBJECTION! Check out my lawyer pin.

Beef is delicious.

The key point is if there is a moonlighting clause for Mr. Carmack. All those other points are rather irrelevant.

It scares me that Carmack looks like Drew.

• Despite the fact that the full source code for the Oculus SDK is available online (developer.oculusvr.com), Zenimax has never identified any ‘stolen’ code or technology."

OH SNAP

You seriously think Blizzard was in the wrong with the whole Dota thing? I don't know about legally, but Valve was the fucking scummy one.

BOPPED

@spraynardtatum: What a childish, and uninformed way of seeing things.

yep, last bullet point is the key one here. If they can't prove their code exists in either anything Oculus has developed internally or made available to the public (the sdk) then... well Zenimax doesn't have much of a case do they?

What? This is the most upside-down perspective I've seen on a subject in a while.

Zenimax fired the first shot. Responding to that is what any self-respecting company should do, and we see it all pass by as an out-of-court settlement far too often. Zenimax saw money and decided to throw out (allegedly) baseless accusations in order to make a quick buck, and Oculus is simply holding their ground. I mean, what the hell? I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. I feel like yeah, maybe Oculus wouldn't have put out a statement like this if Zenimax made the accusations before they got bought, but that's only because they wouldn't have had the money to fight it in court. This idea that Oculus is being "petty" due to "selling out" is a complete fantasy.

I don't see how allowing another corporation to take a shit on them from both a PR standpoint and a financial one is in any way "taking the high road." That's insane.

Zenimax is slimy!

Crazy how much of this seems to come down to when Carmack was off the clock or not. What times in an employee's day are they allowed to not be "at work" ?

I think it's pretty common for companies, at least in the game industry, not to let their employee's work on competing commercial projects even in their off time.

These are pretty consistent with my viewpoint on this issue. Depending on the stipulations of Carmack's former employment, all of the bullet points on that list might be totally irrelevant.

From what I've experienced, public opinion doesn't mean shit. It should but it doesn't. It's all based on how much the lawyer can twist things in their favor.

in some states such a contract clause is not even enforceable, such as California. we shall see.

Okay, I just don't know that these several bullet points tell the entire story. Either do you. In fact, I think it'd be safer to say that it tells only half of the story and does so extremely briefly.

So there's no question that Zenimax is just trying to outright steal Facebook money? Open and shut? Do we really have every bit of information we need to know that all of Zenimax accusations are baseless? Because that's what the crux of your argument is. Oculus is only right to strike back if Zenimax is lying about everything. Which they could be...but I certainly didn't think those 7 single sentence bullet points were enough to prove it.

They did show that Oculus was willing to participate in the shitty theatrics of this whole debacle. Playing the victim with a brand spanking new 2 billion dollars and one of the worlds best team of lawyers. This was the easiest statement they ever wrote.

But I guess I'm wrong because I'm not helping publicly shame Zenimax. Booo Zenimax. Boo. Boo Zenimax. Stay away from Facebooks money Zenimax. You're being a greedy little bitch. Go cry in the corner with the Winklevoss twins. Is this more in line with what I should be saying in this thread? It seems like that's the reality I need to accept. I mean, we're probably not ever even going to know for certain what's true. It's going to be settled out of court and we're never going to know how much value any of this holds.

I don't think it's a fantasy that Oculus sold out (they sold out for 2 billion dollars about a month ago) and I never said Oculus should have done nothing with Zenimax claims. I said that they should have handled this out of the public eye like fucking adults and not played along with Zenimax with this douche-bag response that has turned something meant for the courts to determine into a Twitter fight. It was petty.

@spraynardtatum: Just want to voice my support of your position on this. People are too easily caught up in the "evil vs good" way of looking at this stuff, and too easily led by attempts to sway public opinion where they will never let known the full story of the proceedings.

It is embarrassing that any company plays the public opinion game when it comes to legal cases like this.

And while on the one hand any legal action taken might have been entirely because there's now a boatload of money to be plundered, on the other, now they have a boatload of money in lawyers to fight it.

Though while I always felt like Zenimax made the most baseless claim with their statement on Carmack and Occulus, it's impossible to know all of the behind doors circumstances that led to them making the claim in the first place.

@spraynardtatum: Let's say one of my girlfriend's friends accuses me of cheating on her in front of a bunch of other folks we know. Whether I did or didn't, how will it look to them if I just resolve the situation with my GF in private and never let anyone else know what happened? They'll all assume I'm guilty by omittance.

The same thing happens in news stories when you read about some company doing some shady thing and it says, "When asked about the allegations, they replied 'No Comment.' ". That 'No Comment.' almost always implies, 'Yep. We totally did it.'.

Oculus basically exists now as a wager. It's possible (and I'd say pretty likely) that when the consumer version is released they might not sell enough fast enough to keep the company afloat. If their public image is marred by something like this, it just helps to make that potential outcome more certain.

Look, I don't like Facebook either. I don't use it. And I honestly think that that kind of social media can be damaging to a person. But I don't hate Facebook. You clearly do. And it's wildly skewing your opinion of what is a completely appropriate response to public allegations of illegal activity.

I think that's an unfair assessment on Oculus, mainly because there are a number of underlying reasons why Oculus could have sold to facebook that were beyond the control of the people and it's management. They've technically sold out but your presumptions of "I guess I can't really expect a company owned by Facebook to take the high road." and "Oculus sold out and it shows in the way that they're handling themselves." seem unjustified. I implore you to reassess your stance on Oculus, mainly because Oculus could do great things (and has done great things) and to see their product be tarnished because of pre-conceived notions of the masses would be a crying shame. They're still the same people there... but now their investors have changed and have become a little more financially stable. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you think the Oculus is going down now.

@spraynardtatum: It's just quite clear that your opinion is tainted by the whole Facebook thing. I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect them to handle this sort of thing privately, while the accusations being thrown their way are very clearly NOT private. You seem to be assuming that I think your opinion is crazy because I just want to shit all over Zenimax, but I don't give a fuck about that. It's another cooperation. I think your opinion is crazy because you think that a company being bought by another company immediately makes every action it does some immature "parents arguing in front of their kids" thing, when really it's a PR thing. Staying quiet is in no way "acting like fucking adults" like you say. That's crazy. These are publicly traded companies, and Zenimax is picking a very public fight.

Also, how the fuck does handling it "privately" make them look better? That makes them look worse to literally everyone, yourself included, because you've made it clear that you hate Oculus just because they got bought.

Don't act like everyone is jumping on some Zenimax hate-train when this is clearly spawned from a Facebook hate-train. Your comments are very clearly colored by your feelings on the buyout, and I'm not some "Zenimax-hater" for coming to that conclusion. I couldn't care less about which companies are doing this, I just think your expectations are extremely skewed by something completely unrelated to this actual story.

That would be the rational observers opinion on the whole thing, yes.

Come on Patrick, you have more to say about this, Let it out! The IP laws in the US are so outdated and come down to interpretation of lawyers. There's a huge change coming in how IP is handled in the new age of sharing to the world.

John is smart enough to fully understand and exploit the documents he signs. I truly believe he's legally free of this mess. It's damn unfortunate both companies involved will have to spend millions to come to a conclusion. That money could be put to so much better use.

Folks sure are getting their twat in twist... I just wanted to say twat xD

I really hope this lawsuit doesn't somehow end up delaying the consumer version of the Rift because it's taking up valueable development time from people like Carmack and Luckey.

As much as I want Oculus to 'win', point 1 seems like a misdirection. Zenimax said Carmack's code was used to establish the initial Rift, not that it was in it now.

"A key reason that John permanently left Zenimax in August of 2013 was that Zenimax prevented John from working on VR, and stopped investing in VR games across the company.

Zenimax canceled VR support for Doom 3 BFG when Oculus refused Zenimax’s demands for a non-dilutable equity stake in Oculus."

was this something that just came out now or did i miss this bit of news a while ago? I know we all kind of assumed but it's news to me... and a very crap move on zenimax part all around

Thank you, I feel much safer now.

@fiercedeity: Oh don't get me wrong, I never said Blizzard was the bad guy in the DOTA story. Both companies were pretty dirty in that one, but the fact remains that Blizzard didn't say anything for years until they realized DOTA 2 was getting popular. THEN they decided to take legal action. If Zenimax had decided to contest John Carmack leaving for Occulus, they should have done it the moment he announced he was leaving, or right after.

I guess it doesn't make Blizzard or Zenimax wrong, but it makes them lose a lot of credibility. You can't say "I'm fine with it, whatever" and when the concept gets popular go "About what I said earlier ? Yeah, I was lying."

Zenimax seems to be doing a lot of lawyer bullying...first Mojang, now Oculus. With Mojang they could get away with it, because it cost less to settle than to fight.

Facebook however...like any major corporation, likely keeps a legal team permanently on retainer, so fighting incurs little additional cost to them, as their lawyers get paid regardless of whether someone is actively suing them.

@polyesterpimp: You aren't just willingly sharing your information with other users though, Facebook sells your personal information to third party companies that you've never heard of. Information such as your phone number, address and even your hobbies and interests.

Having said that, I don't hate Facebook or anything, I just don't want it in my life. When the final production model surfaces, if it doesn't have any kind of information-gathering - I'll buy one. I imagine most of the Facebook detractors will do so too.

Lets just step away from Zenimax looking like a scorn lover, but this is common for corporations to tack actions at former employees attempting to do the same work for another company. And Zenimax gets the impression that Carmack is doing the same thing he was paid to do while he was working for them. Usually companies like this have a long grace period because of sensitive materials that can be leaked from company to another. And cases like this are common and it's all told well in advance even before you become an employee.

And even if it's actually going to be professional...... Zenimax shouldn't have done this out in the open, it's basically just making it look like they are a ex-boyfriends who got dumped and are crying in front of their window. I've seen it happen to a couple of people, and I've never seen this happen this open.

They should have done it behind close doors.

A lot of tech companies have contracts that either prevent people from working on their own stuff in their own time or gives them a stake in whatever it is people make. That said, I doubt someone as high profile as Carmack would have that kind of contract. Zenimax sueing, on the other hand, makes me think he might have...

@ripelivejam: Of course they do, they are from Maryland, and everybody knows that people from Maryland are f'ing garbage.