By now you must have heard about facebook Inc. acquiring the Oculus Rift, a 3-D video gaming headset, which is receiving quite a few bad responses from the internet community.
Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, tweeted “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out”. He then goes on to say he doesn’t want to work on social experiences which @KHAILANONYMOUS from Machinima responded “spoken like a true gamer”.
As of March 20th 2014 over 9000 people had already donated to the Oculus kick starter program to help give the developers more funds for the project.
Benefactors are feeling cheated out of their money as @Seedrs tweeted- “We estimate that if you’d put $300 into Oculus Rift through equity crowd funding you could have made a return of $20,000.”
Donor Michael Cooper said “What in the hell was the point of kickstarter if you sell out to a giant company like facebook? This is very disappointing. I will no longer be supporting the Oculus Rift in anyway.”
Gamers on Reddit are commenting that they are upset that the Oculus Rift will now shift to a social experience instead of being a gaming experience as it was originally intended, as facebook CEO Kaz Hirai said “With Facebook’s Oculus Rift, you will get to experience what it’s like to be in a room of targeted ads based on your Facebook Profile.”
As of now the future for 3-D virtual video gaming is unclear, leaving gamers to only hope that larger gaming companies like Microsoft or Sony will produce a virtual experience for the next gen consoles following Xbox one and PS4.