Tuesday 25 March 2014

Facebook Buys Oculus

Jesus H. Christ, when did the internet last flip out about something this hard? It's been a while, but people have every right to be upset in the light of recent events.

So to sum up the tragedy that has just happened; Facebook has bought Oculus for 2 billion Dollars.

Now just in case there are people reading this post who aren't in the know, the Oculus was a Virtual Reality headset that was open source.  This means that anyone was free to go on their website and purchase a devkit and start developing things for it.  This was really interesting because the rift devkit itself was actually pretty cheap, which means that the thing was being worked on by hobbyists and enthusiasts and there was lots of really interesting stuff in the works.

Now, there are some hopeful people on various forums and comments sections that I've seen saying that it's a good thing because now the Oculus has way WAYYYY more funding.  Considering that they were only a small operation this injection of money will be really helpful for them to make the rift even better.

But I think these people are being wilfully ignorant to all the terrible things we already know about the Facebook company.  Just think about that for 2 seconds, we had a product made by a small company that was dedicated to delivering a quality product, being bought out by a huge company who's ONLY focus is monetization.  Now that Oculus is part of Facebook it has to start dealing with shareholders who are only interested in one thing, profits.  That means no new and interesting ideas, just safe shit that will turn a profit which means that a lot of the creativity that was coming out of the Oculus will now be killed.

I could write a big long post about all the terrible things that come with this kind of deal, but I won't because that would take all day and anyone with a working brain probably already understands all the negatives. 

A piece of cutting edge hardware that was once in the hands of gamers and technology enthusiasts now belongs to Facebook and if you don't see something seriously wrong with that then you may just need some kind of professional help.

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