The latest Facebook acquisition is met with a lot of unfavorable reactions. The Oculus Rift backlash began on its Kickstarter page just minutes after announcing the popular social media platform purchased the virtual reality company for $2 billion.
“This is not what I backed this project for. Seriously not,” Jashan C. commented. “I hope Kickstarter will learn from this and find ways to prevent such abuse of their platform in the future.”
“What a disappointing decision to cash out even before getting first consumer version out,” Kert T. added.
But the most vocal, and arguably most influential, figure in this Oculus Rift backlash is Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft. On Twitter, he wrote: “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.”
He further explained his discontent in his blog. “Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts… Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers.
“Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR… But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.”
However, Persson is not shutting the doors on the possibility of incorporating his very popular video game to virtual reality, possibly to Sony’s Project Morpheus. “I definitely want to be part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook.”
