Of course I have a backup!

My very first reaction was that it has to be April's joke. No it's not April. Realizing it's for real, my second thought was fuck, I didn't expect anything to kill my enthusiasm for Oculus. It was supposed to be something for the gaming crowd, now it's something for the masses. I don't consider this to be a bad thing by itself, but what I wanted to see are things like higher framerate, higher resolution, low input lag, which will probably be no longer important if you are not developing for the somewhat niché gamer market.

At this point, everybody believes Facebook is going to plaster it with social sharing, and ads all around, and I agree, that's their whole revenue model: sell ad space, sell personal data. They want to reach more and more people, so they can continue doing this, they probably didn't envision themselves playing TF2. I pity the guys who founded the kickstarter, because they helped raise $2 million, only for it to become swallowed by Facebook, before it actually reached the market. People in the comments section of tech and gamer sites are already up in arms about the acquisiton, and Notch already canceled everything Minecraft related to the Rift, but this is all just a minority, compared to the masses that Facebook is going to reach with this.

Now, taking a step back from all this, there is a bit of good in all of this. Oculus may have not even reached shipping status at all, but now with Facebook's help, they are definitely going to ship something. It will not be the be-all, end-all that people wanted from the Oculus, but it will help VR tech advance in general, and that means it will take less time for someone else (perhaps Valve) to come up with something better tailored for gamers. The sooner I can actually try it out, the better, because it may turn out that it's terrible for games. If it's good, someone else can just release an improved product. There is one remaining contender, Sony's Morpheus but nobody knows anything about that. There are rumors about Microsoft also doing researching in VR tech for a long time now, but since their fuck up with the Xbox One, I'm not expecting much.

So yeah, all in all, I consider this to be a good thing.