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> Beyond our core community, we expected it would be positive.

> If you actually understand [Facebook’s] vision of letting us be who we’re going to be, just like they wanted to let Instagram be who they are.

The reason people don't get this -- or at least, why I don't get it -- and thus responded negatively, is because VR should have nothing to do with Facebook's vision, and Facebook -- or social gaming in general -- should have nothing to do with Oculus' vision.

Gamers cared about Oculus and Rift because they felt Oculus was innovating in the interest of gaming as a whole. But being bought out by Facebook makes it seem that Oculus is "selling out" to someone that is historically more interested in monopolizing innovation than they are in gaming, or at least the type of gaming that Oculus was originally innovating towards.

It's hard for many to see anything under the umbrella of Facebook doing a service to gaming -- look at the direction social gaming has taken us.

This is how I see it, in my admittedly limited view, anyway. And since the views of those "beyond their core community" are likely similarly limited, it makes sense that others may have a similar reaction.

So I'm baffled how Oculus is surprised by the reaction.

8 comments

> Beyond our core community, we expected it would be positive.

How can you go in understanding that you are going to upset your core community and expect anything other than a negative response?

This is the part that stuck out for me as well. They quite plainly state that they knew this would alienate their existing audience, and that they were perfectly fine with that.

And in the end, it's their choice anyway. People respond mostly negatively because of their expectations about how Facebook will monetize this. It's now up to Facebook to prove them wrong.

I personally think it's not going to be as bad. Oculus has a clear path to monetization, while Facebook, with their other products, have always been struggling to monetize their user base, which lead them to implement controversial features like Beacon. In this case, all they have to do is back off and make sure the right people are leading Oculus -- and so far, I think they are doing fine with that.

Money clouds proper judgement. (I'm not implying if this is good or bad, fyi).

> It's hard for many to see anything under the umbrella of Facebook doing a service to gaming -- look at the direction social gaming has taken us.

Yes, look at social gaming. At least inside the retrogaming communities, people who take a very long view of gaming, social gaming is not well loved. It's seen as a shackle not a new experience by and large. Even among new games, Skyrim and GTA V are hugely popular even though the experience is mostly single player.

There have been some good examples of it (Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, EVE), but by and large you end up with Farmville and the new SimCity more often. Both of which are horrible and/or exploitive games.

Getting dozens of spams a day from your "friends" to play this or that shallow psychological-reward hack social game on Facebook is what people are envisioning with this acquisition when what people wanted was Half-Life 3 VR edition or a Star Wars 3D game...or even non-gaming "take a virtual tour around the Pantheon" experiences.

And just as important, social games have no lifespan. I'm used to being able to pull up a 20 year old game and get it working (even on PCs with a little work). Social games in general have a short half-life. Remember the huge hit that was Farmville? Is it even still around? I dunno.

I'm definitely in the camp that thinks this acquisition will come to no good. But to be hoenst, if somebody waived $2b in my face I'd take it and skip off to a comfortable retirement in Malta without giving two shits about the community that supported it in the beginning.

> But to be honest, if somebody waived $2b in my face I'd take it and skip off to a comfortable retirement in Malta without giving two shits about the community that supported it in the beginning.

Would you? Really? It is my understanding the Oculus folks were working on that partly for fun, partly because they have a purpose (the purpose being "VR gaming would be soo cool!"). Their idea of a "comfortable retirement" may very well be to continue working on the Rift. I would also be surprised if they didn't care at all about the community.

Seriously, what would you do if you won $2b tomorrow? I know I wouldn't retire in Malta or such, because it would quickly bore me to death. I would need to do something, and I suspect, so do you.

Absolutely. I wouldn't even look back. I have plenty of other things to occupy my time that isn't work. Painting, writing, photography, music, and the list goes on forever. Freed of the daily grind I would nothing but things I expect no return on simply for the pleasure of it. I'd probably even give away the output of those activities for nothing.

What if you wanted to do something bigger? Like, say, design a next-generation VR platform?

Ah, so you would do something. Okay.

Wow I am sorry that you enjoy your life's work so little. Maybe you should do something about that? I couldn't imagine a life where I was not stoked to do what I do every day.

Weird. When I ask myself this question (as I do often), I don't usually get such a strong answer from myself. But my self just said, "I would work on VR." Fascinating.

Depends on what you mean by that -- The Halo & Call of Duty franchises have been getting by on great social multiplayer experiences. (Halo also has a great campaign, but I digress...)

The great experiment & test of your theory would be to see something like Titanfall only last a year or so, since it's ALL a social/multiplier experience.

In theory I think social gaming has strong networking effects that have to potential to cement a game, especially in crowds that aren't maybe hardcore gamers. For example, I thought one of the best things to come out of the Zynga era was the fact that middle aged mothers were the core gaming segment. Why is this awesome? Because as a life-long gamer I thought it was awesome that more than teenage boys were welcome into the community, regardless if the niche/genre was not my style.

Yes, there are a few problems that no one has quite figured out yet in regards to hyper-social, and solutions have been kind of lazy at best, but there's a big market opp here for somone who DOES figure it out.

Well remember, for every successful social game, there's a Star Wars Galaxies or Age of Conan. Or if successful, try to play Mario Kart Wii or Mario Kart DS. Suddenly tens of millions of gamers get $0 of value out of their purchase because a company has decided it's time for gamers to move on and make their next purchase.

The problem of course is that most companies don't go the way of Quake3 and let people run their own servers. Because that's hard to monetize after the initial purchase. Valve has found a way to make it work, but outside of some very rare exceptions (WoW, 2nd Life), the age of the short-lived social game is here.

It's hard to imagine, but FarmVille isn't even 5 years old.

"social gaming" (as in what Facebook fostered) really means something different from good old "multiplayer gaming". It means the application of "social" as a buzzword and business model (meaning to intentionally exploit network effects) to games, like spamming people's facebook walls against their will, giving in-game benefits for spamming the game to other people, etc.

> Getting dozens of spams a day from your "friends" to play this or that shallow psychological-reward hack social game on Facebook

So, much like the responses to '2048' here on HN, and among members of its community? And, seeing how highly voted those posts and comments were, I assumed that wasn't seen as a bad thing?

> social gaming is not well loved. [...] Even among new games, Skyrim and GTA V are hugely popular even though the experience is mostly single player.

Do you mean un-popular here? Or among new gamers not games? Not sure...

I'm glad that the 2048 craze has petered off a bit. But social gaming is the same thing essentially. It hits, involves lots of people, then the next hit comes around and everybody is off to the new thing.

"new games" vs. "older games"

Case in point: Facebook games are Mafia Wars and Farmville... games that represent raking in tons of money by offering very poor (but addicting) gameplay.

The core gamer audience is pissed off at Facebook as it is, and that is the audience Oculus Rift is aimed towards. If Oculus sold out to Valve, Sony, Microsoft... hell... maybe even EA or Activision... they wouldn't have nearly as bad of a reaction as with Facebook.

Because as bad as EA or Activision is... they have demonstrated an understanding of the core "hardcore" gamer audience that appreciates greater depth and vision in gameplay. Facebook however, does NOT.

See this is why I like that Facebook acquired Oculus. VR shouldn't be the exclusive domain of hardcore gamers.

I want the equivalent of Playstation Home in VR. And nobody can pull that off except Facebook.

Or you know... Sony. The maker of PlayStation Home and the Oculus competitor "Morpheus". Or Valve, the creator of Steam... one of the largest online video game social networks.

Or Second Life, who has a very agreeable model of virtual space and virtual goods.

Don't you see it? Facebook can't currently monetize face-to-face interactions, but in virtual reality they can.

The purchase makes a lot of sense for Facebook. Facebook's business model is to monetize human interactions. Today, most of human interaction happens over the Internet (with messages and images), and in the future, it will happen in virtual environments. VR will be the ultimate platform, and Facebook wants to own that platform.

Virtual reality is not about gaming. Would you describe Matrix as a game? Facebook's wants to put everyone in the Matrix, so they can monetize us.

This is what people fear from Facebook.

Selling out to Microsoft or Sony would have been "monetize by making awesome games". Selling out to Facebook means virtual reality ads will penetrate everywhere you walk.

Just like on Instagram! Wait.

Do you seriously believe this? Then there will be competitors without ads.

Other businesses that are about monetizing human interaction: telephony (pay us to talk to people), restaurants (pay us for a venue to have a conversation/date, show off your wealth), clothing (pay us to increase your apparent status/attractiveness), theater and movies (pay us to have an activity with your friends/date), beyond-low-end housing (pay us so you can entertain and impress and be in a city with lots of humans to interact with).

You say this like it's a dirty, disgusting thing to do, but is Facebook really that different from all of these industries in terms of wanting to monetize human interaction?

All your examples are charging the user for facilitating interaction rather than monetizing on information gleaned from surveilling the interaction. That's a substantial difference.

I would say that the walled garden aspect also makes it pretty substantially different from those industries. I think we all agree that if there was only one restaurant chain or one movie theatre chain it would be a pretty awful experience in comparison to our current reality. It would make financial sense to degrade the experience quite a bit for a relatively small increase in profit per customer. In telephony this experiment was already run and the answer was, yes, it was substantially worse.

So yes, Facebook really is that different from your example industries.

Yes. With the exception of telephony, each of those industries also delivers material/entertainment/comfort value. Telephony is just voice communication and benefits from a network effect and natural monopoly. Facebook has a far more sophisticated model of communication but is most similar to telephony.

The difference between Facebook and telephony is striking. You pay for a telephone connection. Other people pay for your Facebook experience to be mediated to their wishes. Telephony is p2p and we typically frown on operator intervention and worry about excessive centralization. Facebook could be p2p but is centralized and has heavy operator intervention.

Offering communications services for free and then attempting to 'monetize' the interactions that you mediate is distasteful.

There's the obvious difference that there's no platform lock-in with these, and therefore there's choice and competition. Telephony, Internet, are open technologies without locking you in as a customer for any company.

Think back when we lived in caves. We shared stories, we shared cave paintings, we shared music by singing together, we had fun together, we explored and shared our curiosity, we created new things together. Most technology today is still just tools to do these same fundamental things, but in novel ways. Facebook wants to be the middleman in this. They didn't invent 'social', they brought it into digital world, they want to own it, and they want to monetize it.

No FB is exactly the same. They monetize interactions. So what kind of interactions will you be having with an OVR strapped to your face that they'll now be monetizing?

I upvoted you because I thought your comment didn't deserve the downvoting it was getting

How will you do a face to face interaction when you are both wearing VR goggles ?

You and I can be in different locations. But, with the goggles on, we can be face to face inside VR.

Spot on. The problem is that it's very difficult to conceptualize a merger of the two companies' products that ISN'T really, really unpleasant. Most people are already tired of and/or annoyed with Facebook and having it strapped to your face and watching everything you do in a "virtual reality" is very offputting. Facebook is linked to publication and noise, and it creates an aura of intrusion. When you post on Facebook, you are performing for your hundreds of acquaintances and friends. People don't want to feel like they'll have to be doing that every time they use an Oculus product, let alone one so intimate that you literally strap it to your face. I know no one who sits back and thinks, "I need more Facebook in my life".

I don't know why they didn't see it coming, but almost anyone would've been less creepy than Facebook. People would have still have concerns, but I think they'd be more optimistic if it was Google or something.

> The reason people don't get this -- or at least, why I don't get it -- and thus responded negatively, is because VR should have nothing to do with Facebook's vision, and Facebook -- or social gaming in general -- should have nothing to do with Oculus' vision.

Honest question: why shouldn't VR be in Facebook's vision?

_Someone_ is going to create a Google Hangouts-style product that incorporates VR. I'm not excited that it is FB, per say, but I can see how a company built on social interactions is going to want a piece of that pie.

I get the frustration about the short-term impact on gaming, but I don't (yet?) understand why this is a bad move for VR in general...

There are IMO two angles to this that I identify with (to different degrees):

1 - People wanted Oculus to be a driving force in gaming, and based on recent post-acquisition statement it looks like the company is much more interested in the Metaverse than they are in gaming.

This is certainly a more ambitious goal and a harder problem overall to tackle than gaming, but a lot of Oculus fans don't give two hoots about the Metaverse and just want to fly airplanes, shoot monsters, explore dungeons, or what have you.

There is (IMO a justifiable) fear that the company is going to abandon, or at least scale back, their efforts in promoting Oculus for gaming, in favor of its own goals creating the Metaverse. Like you said, Google Hangouts in VR.

2 - People are excited that the Metaverse a la Snow Crash is actually going to happen, but do not believe Facebook to the be right people to bring this about. The reasoning for this varies, but mostly comes down to privacy protections, prevalence of advertising, and Facebook's seemingly infinite capacity for nickel and diming their users.

In this case people understand perfectly well why VR would be part of Facebook's vision - it just scares the bejeezus out of them.

The perceived bad move for VR in general is that Oculus is going to become a Facebook product, rather than a well-supported, well-evangelized platform on which a whole VR ecosystem can be built (i.e., the original vision). The chief fear is that eventually people are going to by the Oculus purely to access Facebook Presents the Metaverse instead of to access a wide ecosystem of VR products.

Nevertheless, there will be competition.

Let's say your worst fears realize, and the Rift is a locked down Virtual Facebook Experience. Well, they still need to solve presence, and that means:

- Higher resolutions panels.

- Higher frequency panels.

- Low persistence panels.

- Ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency video feeds (a better HDMI or something)

- Graphics processing from Moore's Rabbit Hole

- And lots of other thing that like the above, they won't develop in-house.

Once they have that, somebody will swoop in and create a "Trif" using the better, cheaper material than what the demand driven by the Evil Rift made possible. Remember, the Rift itself is possible because of Retina phone displays.

Or someone will jailbreak their Rift.

> I get the frustration about the short-term impact on gaming, but I don't (yet?) understand why this is a bad move for VR in general...

That's just it. Fans of Oculus and the Rift were (mostly) interested in the gaming of VR. You have a point, that Facebook can certainly leverage VR to expand their product. But I think it's not in the direction previous/current fans (or even followers) of Oculus were/are interested in.

I'm not necessarily questioning whether this move is in the best interest of Facebook or Oculus. I think both companies will benefit from this long-term.

My point is that this isn't in the interest of the fans/followers of Oculus, and there's no explanation as to how Oculus would be surprised by the negative reaction of those outside the core community.

In fact, the only ones I can think of that would not react to this move negatively are fans of Facebook, and those invested in Facebook and Oculus.

It's not that VR shouldn't be in Facebook's vision. It's that Facebook's vision shouldn't be a primary player in VR.

Why?

> _Someone_ is going to create a Google Hangouts-style product that incorporates VR.

Are they? Why is VR inevitable?

We already went through this once in the 90s, and the same truths are still true: nobody wants to put a face-covering headset just to communicate with other people.

> Why is VR inevitable?

Good point, I agree that I am making a big assumption.

That said, I don't think the argument that "it didn't work before" is valid. I don't think people want face-covering headsets that _suck_.

If I can wear an _awesome_ headset and have a virtual conversation with my family across the country, I'd purchase one in a heartbeat.

You could say the same thing about computers.

Nobody wants to sit in front of a screen just to communicate with other people. Yet billions of people do.

Up until now the technology simply hasn't been good enough to address the "presence" issue.

There's no reason. The problem with the acquisition is that FB could have been just one virtual experience among thousands for OVR, now it's likely to be the only one.

If FB wanted anyone to believe they had some mighty vision in social gaming, then why didn't they buy out Zynga or other game companies like that that actually had massive userbase on their actual platform.

It's easy to take the moral high ground when you don't have a three comma offer sitting on the table in front of you.

The point isn't that they made a bad/immoral decision.

The point is that they say this:

> Beyond our core community, we expected it would be positive.

Oculus are brilliant people -- how could they expect this would be received positively, even by those "beyond our core community"?

I'd sell out in a heart beat. However, I also wouldn't be shocked at the outrage.

Same. And I also would go do an interview claiming that I was.

"Greed is good"?

That isn't an argument for the moral low ground. It wasn't like the alternative was "or you get nothing".

The alternative was "or you get to pursue the vision you built the company on and potentially have a few more commas in front of you".