There were a lot of extreme reactions to the announcement that Facebook is buying Oculus Rift, the promising virtual reality headset company, but Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson probably had the most immediate impact.
“We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out,” Notch wrote on his Twitter.
Notch followed up with a blog post outlining his feelings on the situation, saying he supports VR and was one of the Oculus Rift’s top-level Kickstarter backers, but Facebook isn’t something he wants to be involved with.
“Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.
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. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?
But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.
Fortunately, the rise of Oculus coincided with competitors emerging. None of them are perfect, but competition is a very good thing. If this means there will be more competition, and VR keeps getting better, I am going to be a very happy boy. I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.
And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.”
So, no official Minecraft on Oculus. It’s too bad it happened this way, because unofficial attempts at it looked kinda cool. Check out the video above to see an example. And there’s still a mod called Minecrift that works with the Rift.
[image from Germanlet’splay’s Youtube Channel]
You must be logged in to post a comment Login