I've had my Oculus Rift dev kit sitting on my desk since last spring, and until this week I mostly thought of it as the best two hundred and something dollars I've spent on a piece of hardware. I backed the Kickstarter back in August 2012, one of the wide-eyed few who threw money at a headset that didn't exist yet because a demo video and a guy named Palmer Luckey convinced me VR was finally going to happen for real this time. It felt like getting in early on something good, and I don't get that feeling very often.
Then this week Facebook announced its buying Oculus for two billion dollars, and the whole thing got complicated in about four minutes.
I don't think this is some obvious betrayal, whatever the angrier corners of the Rift forums are calling it right now. Two billion dollars is a number that changes what a small VR company can actually build. Oculus was still years away from a real consumer headset on the money it had before, and now it presumably isn't. Thats not nothing, and I'm not going to pretend it is just because the news stung a little.
The thing that actually got me though, more than the price tag, was Notch's tweet. Markus Persson, the guy who made Minecraft, had apparently been in talks with Oculus about bringing a Rift version of the game to the headset, which, if you've tried Minecraft in VR even on the janky early builds people were hacking together, is genuinely one of the best arguments for why this whole technology matters. He killed the deal. Said Facebook creeps him out, more or less, and that he doesn't want to be involved with a platform he doesn't trust. No hedging, just canceled it and said so in public for everyone to see.
I keep going back and forth on whether that was an overreaction. Facebook isn't going to read my Minecraft session logs and sell them to advertisers, probably. But I backed a hardware Kickstarter, not a stake in a social network, and there's a real difference between those two things even though the box on my desk hasn't physically changed at all. The Rift I own is still the Rift I owned on Monday. It boots the same demos, gives me the same slightly nauseous five minutes in the Tuscany house tour. The company around it is just different now, and I don't think its unreasonable for that to bother people, even if I can't fully explain why it bugs me either.
What I keep landing on is that Kickstarter backers were never shareholders to begin with. We got dev kits and a T-shirt and the satisfaction of an early backer number, not equity, not a vote, nothing that entitles any of us to a say in who buys the company down the line. I knew that going in, I really did. Still stings watching it happen, is all. Something like nine thousand of us put up two and a half million dollars on a promise back in 2012, and less than two years later the company is worth something like eight hundred times that to somebody with much deeper pockets and much different priorities than "lets make VR good."
I don't have a tidy take on where this leaves the actual hardware, and I'm suspicious of anyone who already does, because right now this is a press release and some investor math, not a shipping product. Maybe the Facebook money means the consumer version comes out faster and cheaper than it would have on its own, and in a few years nobody even remembers any of this happened because the headset just works. Maybe it goes the other way and gets buried under ad integration nobody asked for. Both stories are plausible today and I refuse to pretend I know which one we're getting.
The dev kit stays on my desk either way, still doing exactly what it did last week. I'm going to keep using it and see what actually ships before I decide how I feel about any of it long-term. The Minecraft thing though - that one I'm annoyed about specifically, deal or no deal.