Oculus Rift launch date unaffected by Facebook acquisition, Luckey says
Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR won't speed up the Rift's development or push forward a launch date, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey told Game Informer. "There are things that are fixed in time that need to happen that no amount of money or partnership can move," Luckey said.
Facebook's buyout was a sudden shock to the industry at large, and it happened almost as quickly on the inside, right in Oculus headquarters after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tried the hardware for himself, Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe told the site.
"It almost happened overnight, believe it or not," Iribe said. After Zuckerberg tried out some new Oculus Rift demos, he asked the company, "What can I do to help? What can Facebook do to help?"
Iribe said Facebook intends to let Oculus operate as it wants, as a separate entity supported by Facebook's infrastructure, audience and market power: "If you actually understand [Facebook's] vision of letting us be who we're going to be, just like they wanted to let Instagram be who they are. They want to set a precedent of leaving companies alone, but integrating and being able to allow that company to leverage the momentum and strength and size of Facebook."
Reaction online, from the public, has been more negative than Oculus predicted, VP of Product Nate Mitchell said.
"We assumed that the reaction would be negative, especially from our core community," he said. "Beyond our core community, we expected it would be positive. I don't think we expected it to be so negative. As people begin to digest it a bit and think about it, you can see that Twitter and Reddit is swinging back the opposite direction. The onus is on us to educate people, and we want to share everything we're doing."
