PLEASE don't give up on VR!

[jspenguin]

A lot of developers are cancelling their projects as a knee-jerk reaction to the news, but some are still optimisitic that either a strong competitor will emerge, or that this deal won't be nearly as bad as everyone's initial reaction.

If you are considering cancelling a VR project because you have lost faith in Oculus, consider using, or even creating, an abstraction layer that can work with whatever device the user chooses. Valve's Steamworks VR API is a start, but it's still a little too encumbered with Steam right now. I would rather see a lightweight standalone API that's not tied to any specific hardware or software.

Right now, Oculus SDK = Voodoo Glide API. Games supported Glide only because it was the only thing that would work with Voodoo cards. Once Quake came along with OpenGL support, and Voodoo released a bare-bones MiniGL driver, games dropped Glide and started supporting OpenGL instead.

[Rocsmasher]

I don't think that Devs should drop their projects. I 100% against it. But this seemed like the project was being run by the people. The kick-starters and the Dev Kit owners even the workers on the project need to try convince Palmer to not partner. Show him all of the things Facebook has bought and ruined. This is just my opinion, probably people have way better ideas than a petition at most.

[DarkAkuma]

I'm not ready to announce the cancellation of my projects or future projects. While I have strong feelings against Facebook, I also have strong feelings in favor of VR. I've made to many gut reactions in my life based on a negative to not have learned from them and know to just wait and see before I choose which strong feeling wins out.

But I do understand devs like Notch and his gut reaction. Even so much that I have a new found respect for him, and I'm now considering buying his $17 overpriced ($27 total) game.

Anyway. It's obvious that Oculus has a LOT of damage control to do to win back the vast majority of the community they just alienated. So I'm waiting on that to make up my mind on where I stand and my future with VR.

[langknow]

I think a lot of people are just overreacting. They don't have all the facts . And they also have no idea what they are talking about.

For example, how is being able to custom build hardware for VR a bad thing ? Would VR be better really with premanufacturing screens that were used for phones versus actually custom made screens for the purpose of VR ?

This facebook partnership just makes sense.

[ganzuul]

Notch has a lot less riding on this than the rest of us.

I've invested too much time in this to just give up. But what Facebook does to make money terrifies me.

[zeroxygen]

Cancelling projects over this would seem rather strange. How could this mean anything other than more units sold, and more potential consumers of content?

You would think existing projects would be that much safer by this news.

[zeroxygen]

"ganzuul" wrote:
Notch has a lot less riding on this than the rest of us.

I've invested too much time in this to just give up. But what Facebook does to make money terrifies me.

Facebook provides free services. One shouldn't be surprised that data on a free service is used for profit elsewhere. Free will never include privacy.

[CalamityRaven]

"zeroxygen" wrote:
Cancelling projects over this would seem rather strange. How could this mean anything other than more units sold, and more potential consumers of content?

You would think existing projects would be that much safer by this news.

Unless ofcourse a developer cares how they make their money not just how much of it.

More units sold is great, the extra resources will be fantastic for Oculus and bodes well for the first consumer version. But that comes at a cost. No one is getting a product any more, the fundamental business model for Oculus has changed, they won't be making money from the hardware any more, they aren't selling a product, they're selling a service now. And no one has a service more invasive than Facebook. How that'll eventually affect the SDK or even publishing routes and consumer experiences remains to be seen, but it will affect them.

Before, Oculus were selling a peripheral in a new market, now Facebook are trying to seize as much market share in this new market as possible and with that comes restrictions, closed off systems and all of the many things Oculus were 100% against yesterday.

[DavidMulder]

That's the thing, facebook is going to earn money off this one way or another and it's not going to be the only way we would find acceptable: hardware. My guess is that it's going to be something like http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/25/5547946/welcome-to-planet-facebook , but who knows, could be just something like the steam store only (with a 30% cut like apple). So at the very least for indi developers it might be wise to stop investing for the time being and first see how much of a cut facebook is going to take out of their games and see whether they still are willing to take the risk. Oh well, really glad project morpheus exists now, at first it worried me a tiny bit (though excited me more than it worried me), now I am ridiciously glad they are here. First it was Oculus which had to keep Sony in check, now it will be mainly the other way round.

[ThreeEyes]

Well, I know this throws a lot of uncertainty into what I was planning. Not that I'm any kind of big fish to Oculus. Anything I did would be niche market and not PC based VR, but Oculus is a big fish to me. With what Zuckerberg is saying about rebranding, advertising, and social integration, I really don't know if I'd be designing for the long or even short haul.

I was already part of development projects for hardware that the company pulled the rug out from under all their developers totally disregarding the time, money, and efforts we had put in that had made their company successful. It was stuff for the Handspring Visor. They were visionaries too, had split off from Palm to create Handspring, and then sold it all back to Palm who liquidated the product line.

There were lots of promises to the developers there too but in the end we got screwed big time.

So I'll wait before I invest time and money again and tie my future to another company in transition. Been there. Done that.