I guess the bad PR keeps on coming for Palmer Lucy and his baby Oculus. A jury has just awarded Zenimax $500million in damages as a result of Palmer Lucky breaking a non-disclosure agreement.

http://www.pcgamer.com/jury-awards-500-million-to-zenimax-in-lawsuit-against-oculus-vr/?utm_content=buffere0d8f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer-pcgamertw

Give Mikami a piece of that and Tango can go quietly make The Evil Within 2. :D

What was actually disclosed that broke the agreement?

At this point, what incentive does Facebook have to keep Palmer on? The guy's a walking PR nightmare.

@liquiddragon: oh man. Dammit. Now you got my imagination running wild.

I assume more information is to follow but Zenimax claimed that some keycode was brought over with John Carmack when he joined Oculus and Palmer Lucky used the code in the Oculus development. I don't know how that means Palmer Lucky broke the non-disclosure agreement and not John Carmack but thats what the court ruled.

Not so luckey now!

I'm sorry

I'm interested in the specifics of this ruling. Palmer broke NDA - but didn't misappropriate Zenimax tech - for a $500 million Oculus fine? I'm a laymen when it comes to these rulings but that seems really high.

As always, wait for the inevitable appeal and subsequent settlement to see where the eventual number ends up, if they ever get disclosed. Although given the personalities at play here, that might not happen in this case.

And as to what was actually disclosed, we'll probably never know. And it's equally possible nothing actually was. Remember that this was a jury trial, and while they're supposed to only consider the charges and jury instructions as given to them by the judge, there's no guarantee they'll actually do that. From the outside looking in, this case has got a strong whiff of "plaintiff couldn't technically prove any individual claim, but uncovered enough nefarious shit that the jury decided to say they did anyway."

Take for example, the John Carmack testimony. I know that he was probably wasn't deliberately trying to be an asshole on the stand and was just trying to precise in an engineer-y sort of way while explaining his thought process. But when you read through his statements it's easy to see how it might have come across as, "Yeah, I took some shit from my ex-employer which I knew I wasn't allowed to do. But it's not really stealing because I'm John Fucking Carmack and the rules don't apply to me because I'm special and smarter than everyone else." I don't see a jury reacting real well to that.

@big_denim: I mean it has to be happening right? What else could Tango be doing.

Man, dirtbag Palmer Lucky made a sweet deal selling off this company and leaving Facebook to deal with actually making the tech usable/interesting/affordable as well as these fighting Sony and Valve and lawsuits.

I think that would depend on how the situation was handled. It is very likely that Palmer was acting as a supervisor/manager over Carmack during the entire ordeal. If Carmack had made Palmer aware of what he was doing, and both of them veto'd it then the fault would be on Oculus aka Palmer. Had Carmack gone and started his legit own thing I think it would of been different, but in this instance the courts obviously ruled that the break of non disclosure was benefited by Oculus.

This is kind of crazy though, I didn't really know how the courts would rule on this since it's such an odd thing. Regarding the keycode, was that keycode developed by Carmack while he worked for ZeniMax or did other developers work on it as well? Thats where this thing becomes confusing to me. Because while obviously Carmack working on his code while he worked at ZeniMax would be wrong, if it's still his code and his body of work that is a different thing entirely.

Good thing they have Facebook money now.

@cmblasko: I think their argument was that they didn't directly use anything that was created at Zenimax, but what they created was close enough that they were obviously going off of information gathered while working at Zenimax.

There's also a large part of the fine coming from the fact that Luckey was misleading people into believing that the Rift was supported by Zenimax, and they also used Doom 3 to show it off without permission.

I thought this was about John Carmack, not Luckey?

Wouldn't that be considered "trade secrets?" The article says that Oculus "did not misappropriate ZeniMax trade secrets."

I guess I don't really know what a "trade secret" is here nor how you technically "misappropriate" them. In this case it would most likely refer to code and hardware, right?

You are aware Oculus is far bigger than Palmer Luckey?

@cmblasko: As far as I understand it, misappropriating trade secrets would mean that they used actual code or designs that were created at Zenimax. I think everything they created for Oculus was new, but based on their knowledge of what happened at Zenimax.

@wynnduffy We'll he's accurate. Palmer Luckey does have to personally pay $50 million so he will have less money. Probably not an amount that he'd ever notice was missing though.

A far cry from the $4 billion zenimax wanted though

I'm still not convinced Palmer Luckey exists anymore.

Palmer Luckey isn't a good person and also enjoys playing Smash. Now I'm not saying those two things are related, but I'm not not saying that either.

Still don't regret having a Oculus, touch is awesome VR is amazing it's just a shame what Luckey turned out to be.

Pretty sure Zuckerburg personally killed him and setup a body double just for the court hearings.

It's amazing that Palmer Lucky could pay that out of pocket and still live a carefree life with his remaining 200 million.

@cerberus3dog: He's worth over 700 million.

Crazy what a year can do to public opinion, i'm still not sure Zenimax deserves anything.

That seems like a lot. The 4 billion they wanted is just ludicrous.

@luchalma: It looks like Oculus "won" this trial. It could have been way worse.

@luchalma: It's not that ludicrous when you look at what they were claiming and the fact that Oculus was sold for 2 billion.

@werupenstein: Im also interested in knowing this.

Yo, ZeniMax's official response on why they won this court decision is INSANE! I mean, what in the world is this:

Man, Carmack comes off looking real bad in these. Hard to see someone I have so much respect for pulling some dirt bag moves like this. If it comes out that cliffy b killed a guy, I'm going to take up knitting.

Also,

" ZeniMax may seek court order to halt sale of current Oculus Rift headsets."

@zombiepie: My favourite part of this is that RAGE is now newsworthy again.

Seriously though, they way they describe it sounds like pure corporate espionage.

I guess the Rockstar v The Benz stuff is still pending in the background.

strangely and sadly this makes me think less highly of carmack. i guess even the most logical seeming people can be capable of goofball shit. maybe he's capable of emotion and did it to purposely slight his previous employer.

People are jumping on the Carmack is a dirtbag bandwagon far too quickly. Remember the source of the information.

The source being... the judgement of a court of law after perusing countless documents and hearing hours of testimony?

Not that I'm joining the dogpile on Carmack.

But wow... Zenimax's option to now seek an injunction to stop Oculus headset sales... that could have a major effect on the health of the VR industry. And with all that money that Zenimax is going to get, Dishonored 3 is going to be FUCKING LIT. /jk

@zombiepie said:

Yo, ZeniMax's official response on why they won this court decision is INSANE! I mean, what in the world is this:

I love that they included the fact he Googled it. It makes it feel like an amateur spy move or something.

lmao, i could buy some of that but Carmack needing to look up how to wipe a hardrive is too much.

There are two possibilities that I see being likely:

One: Carmack, a programmer, game engine engineer, and developer of basically modern VR, wanted to illegally destroy evidence and yet somehow didn't know how to wipe his hard drive...then decided to google it. (The hilarious option)

Two: Someone else at Oculus (where Carmack works and likely keeps his computer) knew the lawyers had come calling and wanted to destroy evidence to help their case. They then did so while Carmack was out of office.

Either of these are possible. The first seems...weird, but would be possible still. The second, if it occurred, wouldn't surprise me if it was Lucky himself. As much as I want to like him, he's shown to be untrustworthy (making promises on AMAs and the campaign he knew he couldn't keep, being untrue about pricing, the whole meme magic nonsense, etc), and he's the most impacted by the lawsuit.

@galacticpunt: People are reacting to Zenimax's statement, not the court judgement.

I don't know why John carmack looking up how to wipe a hard drive seems so astonishing. Not too many people actually work with disks at a low level. He's a great programmer but he's not a god.

It figures that genius programmer John Carmack fucked up looking for a way to wipe a harddrive, rather than doing like any layperson would do and just beating that shit flat with a hammer.

@hunkulese: I got what you were inferring the first time. While Zenimax aren't paragons of virtue, I'm less inclined to think that they are making things up in their post-victory statement. They are almost certainly listing things that were sufficiently proven over the course of the lawsuit. Still, I'm all for reporters checking out the records for a less slanted take.

White collar crime is always so interesting to me. Office Space is one of my favorite movies and I can just picture Palmer et al. conspiring in an apartment and having some dude go "DON'T WORRY MAN I WON'T TELL ANYONE!"