I for one, am excited about VR and Oculus. But I don't give a shit about Facebook buying them either. I think it will actually be a good thing and give them the cash they need to make it more mass market. Sure, it's a niche item now. But what about in ten years? I think Facebook was very smart with this acquisition.
I'm Not Losing Sleep Over Facebook Buying Oculus (or VR in General, Really)
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 On 03/28/2014 at 09:00 AM by gigantor21 See More From This User » |
So people have been flipping their shit over Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Kickstarter-backed Oculus. Tears have been shed over the "golden son" of the latest VR craze going corporate. Vitriol has been flung at Oculus, CEO Palmer Lucky and John Carmack over "selling out". Paranoia over Facebook integration, data-mining and ads have swept the Internet! It's mass hysteria!
Well I, for one, don't really give a shit either way.
See, I'm not sold on VR. Despite all the breathless praise for the concept being sung from the rafters lately, I don't really buy the "next big thing in gaming" talk surrounding it. There are several issues surrounding it that give me pause.
One big one is price. The dev kits for the Oculus Rift go for $350, and the company has been cagey about how much the finalized consumer product would cost. But even if the device is at a good price (say, $100 or less), it's still designed with gaming PCs in mind--the company has gone on record saying that the latest consoles aren't going to be powerful enough to run it.
A key factor in the success of touch controls is that it leverages technology that everyone already owns. Traditional controllers for phones aren't nearly as big, meanwhile, because of the added cost, niche appeal and inconvenience that comes with them. If people had to pay an extra $100 in order to play Angry Birds or Candy Crush, those games wouldn't have taken off, It's main potency as a product would lie in making it a standalone device with it's own processing, memory and storage capcacity (i.e. Google Glass), but any decent specs will not come cheap.
The second issue is useability. How does this add anything to a game like, say, Street Fighter? Or Shovel Knight? Or even Tomb Raider? Games that aren't designed with first-person perspective in mind--where the tech shows it's most potency--don't benefit from or need VR. Thus it's potential uses for gaming would be limited regardless of how much it cost to use it, much like the Kinect or the WiiU Gamepad. It's far more valuable as a general entertainment or educational device, frankly--something that a company like Facebook is suited to take advantage of.
Then there's the whole issue surrounding Kickstarter backers getting mad.
I went back and looked on the Kickstarter page, and saw no "promise to stay independent" stretch goal or reward tier anywhere. At what point were backers promised a say in the direction of the company that leadership had to defer to? Or the promise of financial compensation for their investment? Yet I've seen any number of pissy comments that demand one or the other, just because they pre-ordered a dev kit and Doom 3 basically.
The people who pledged already got what they paid for a year and a half ago. Whatever warm and fuzzy feelings they had about being part of some grassroots movement was just that--feelings. It is by no means the same as, say, being an investor who owns a stake in the company. I find it hard to feel much sympathy for the backers moaning about this when they assumed far too much about what their pledges actually got them to begin with.
So yeah. Given all that, I'm having a hard time drumming up enough interest to join the debate over whether or not Facebook's purchase has "ruined gaming". And to be quite honest? Facebook leveraging the technology for more than making PC games more immersive will likely make the tech far more viable in the long run. And given how other companies are rushing in with their own models, it's not like OR is going to be the only game in town.
I'm just going to leave my pitchfork at home for this one.
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