They had a Kickstarter to make a point and click adventure game, and ended up making a wildly successful, well-reviewed, gorgeous game, as well as a series of compelling, entertaining documentaries showing details of the game development process rarely shared or disclosed to the average gamer.
Yeah, they totally ‘blundered it up.’
The Facebook shill brigade scumbags are trying to manufacture consent all over the Internet on this, of course.
They’ve been clearly busted on reddit already:
Just think, Facebook is perfectly willing to pay shills to decieve the public. With these kind of “ethics”, is it really smart to trust them with any of your personal information?
On another note, corporate shills and libertarians are making reddit unbearably shitty. I suspect more than a few of the moderators at reddit are getting payoffs to protect the shills as well.
It’s honestly often hard to tell the difference between corporate shills and many libertarians. They often spew the same misinformation that ignores externalities and focuses on half-truths. The only difference is many libertarians do it unwittingly because for some reason their brains are hard-wired to accept corporatist think tank “studies” and other corporatist FUD as factual without looking at the bigger picture (once again, externalities).
Frankly, I’d rather give money to Sony than Facebook.
Microsoft has stopped being a bad-actor?
From the Kickstarter TOS:
No agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship is created as a result of the Terms of Use and neither party has any authority of any kind to bind the other in any respect.
And:
Project Creators may cancel or refund a Backer’s pledge at any time and for any reason, and if they do so, are not required to fulfill the reward.
So the former means there’s no deal beyond “You give us cash, we take it, you might get a thing” and the latter means that even if everyone objects, they get their cash back and Rift/Facebook goes home washing their hands of the dirty masses.
I didn’t say that, but they certainly toned it down in the wake of the antitrust cases, Halloween Documents, etc. Or at least they’ve gotten better about keeping that type of shit on the down low.
I understand the feeling of ‘Oh well, it all feeds into big business in the end’, but to be honest I wonder why this article wasn’t written earlier when Oculus received one of its $16million and $75milliion rounds of funding? That was when it became obvious that Kickstarter couldn’t produce the scale of funding required, and also the point where Oculus were no longer free agents, becoming instead a company doing exciting stuff looking to be bought by a larger company.
There’s still an independent out at this stage that many companies have successfully taken: IPO. It’s hard to reinvent the intermediate investment portion, but there’s still hope!
This is what I came away with as well: the way the Oculus Rift people lost their nerves, and decided to get the money while they could. With Sony making their vaporware announcement, they might have felt that this was their only real chance to avoid getting crushed.
Oh, well. It hurts in the same way that it hurts in a difficult video game where you fight and fight and fight, finally getting good enough to see the final boss taking massive blows, and then getting KO’ed yourself. You could taste it, but now you have to start all over again.
God damn shit fuck shit fuck god damn!
AHHHHH!
This news makes me ill. I really wanted to see Oculus tear open the market on their own and rise. I would have been happy if a good company had bought them, like Valve. I would have found the silver lining if a hated video game company had bought them, like EA. I would have even had some hope left if a big company that does blue sky projects had bought them, like Google. But fucking Facebook? FUCKING FACEBOOK!? What technology in this entire god damn world has Facebook brought us besides Facebook? I can name a mountain of shit Facebook and spewed from its gaping encrusted orifices upon this world, like “social” gaming and “free to play”. Fuck fuck fuck! But Facebook has not brought anything even vaguely good to this world other than (and this is really fucking arguable) Facebook.
Short of AT&T or Comcast, I really can’t think of a company that I would like less than Facebook to have bought them.
This just makes me ill. The future was so damn close, and now it feels like it just got hijacked. I am sitting here looking at my Kickstarter Rift right now. I was chomping on the bit to buy the released version that was coming later this year. The community working to plug the rift into everything was amazing. Every indie developer and their dog was ready to make their game run with the Rift. Now it is all fucking dead. Seriously, any other fucking company on this god damn planet could have bought them and I would have had a little hope. Why fucking Facebook?
I hope the Scourge McDuck money pile purchased at the cost of a few million geek’s hopes and dreams was worth it.
FUCK!
Shorter version: this is like Yahoo buying Flickr all over again.
Dean, you seem to be forgetting something. In between the oh-so-rebel crowdfunding and the Facebook purchase, there was $200 million in assorted VC and angel investment.
Oculus has been “business as usual” for a long time now; nobody should be surprised at the investors jumping at the opportunity of an early exit.
I think that book is probably going to be a catalog.
I’ll probably buy the Valve VR headset off steam when they roll it out 
Curiously, the same sentiment gets repeated pretty much every time
Google/Apple/Facebook/Microsoft buy anything. Talk about your toxic
branding.
All true, but one thing Google, Apple and Microsoft have in common is that they have both diehard fans and haters, albeit in different proportions. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s had a kind word about Facebook. Ever.
FB wants its own Google glass, and now it has it.
First e-tablets on our faces, then cool shades, then contacts.
To be really pedantic, the Pebble watch pre-dated Occulus Rift and raised about four times as much on Kickstarter.
BTW, I do feel your pain. I was really getting excited about a commercial release of OR but now? Not so much.
However, Instagram is still standing and Whatsapp will probably not be interfered with too much if the deal goes through. I just don’t want to give Facebook any of my money.
You know those comments from people saying “I just read that as”, well I just read that as “FBI wants its own Google glass”, and that would kinda make sense.
Haha. Funnily enough, or sadly enough, you’re not too far off when linking FaceB to the FBI …and co.
That’s great. I hadn’t thought of that angle yet but Facebook could totally fund the Alien turning into the Matrix as it eats our faces. awesome, I can’t wait for my bullet time.
