Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey took to Reddit last night answering concerned users. They affirmed you ”will not need a Facebook account” to use it, or develop for it. Liked.
People are uneasy that Facebook has acquired Oculus VR, given their tract record for unleashing the social platform now dominating everything and constantly harassing us.
Palmer Luckey however says this will be a great thing for the VR venture because it means ”even more freedom than we had under our investment partners because Facebook is making a long term play on the success of VR, not short-term returns. A lot of people are upset, and I get that. If you feel the same way a year from now, I would be very surprised.”
”We promise we won’t change,” he said. ”If anything, our hardware and software will get even more open, and Facebook is onboard with that.” John Carmack also chimed in saying he’s still coding just like he was before the buyout.
”For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week. I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR,” tweeted Carmack. The concern is that Facebook will start interfering with Oculus and even steer it toward focusing on their plans to bring VR to the social platform. Oculus VR are adamant that won’t happen.
”We have not gotten into all the details yet, but a lot of the news is coming. The key points:”
1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon.
2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects.
3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon.
Oculus plan to use a lot of these new resources to fuel the indie studios diving into virtual reality.
”…we have struggled to properly support indie devs because we had to focus our limited resources on our closest partners, that has been a failing that I want to fix. Indie developers are the ones driving this VR revolution more than anyone else, and one of my personal goals has been to support them in a much stronger way,” continued Luckey.
”Our developer relations/publishing team is really small right now, just a few guys. That is one of the reasons Oculus Share applications have taken so long, they get backed up behind the hundreds of developers we talk to every day.”
There are reportedly exclusive Oculus Rift games in the works. For now, we wait.
