What All the Outrage Over the Oculus Deal Says About Facebook, the Brand
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Over on the Hacker News message board, there’s a lot of discussion of the optics of the deal, like, “The whole thing betrays a certain lack of ambition. It’s like if the early Microsoft had said: ‘Microsoft in every home? Nah, fuck it, let’s just get acquired by IBM'” (AlexandrB).
More pointedly, there seems to be plenty of fear about what Facebook intends to do with its shiny new toy: “Those of us salivating over the prospect of Oculus for gaming never wanted it to be subject to Facebook’s ‘vision'” (EpicEng). And “Facebook is the kind of company that wants to control their market and their platform. The Oculus Rift was an exciting piece of tech that was untied to any platform, giving an open opportunity for software developers to explore VRUI. Now, it gives Facebook the opportunity to explore VRUI. Of course, I’m afraid they’re going to tie the hardware to their awful, invasive Web platform. I’d be upset if it were Google, but Facebook is about as bottom-of-the-ethical-barrel as it gets” (pfraze).
It’s not just anonymous hackers who are shitting on Facebook, though. Last night “Minecraft” creator Markus Persson, who’d made a low-level investment in Oculus and was planning an Oculus Rift version of the game (now suddenly canceled), wrote on his blog,
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