A lot of gamers got upset with Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR and while the company expected its core community to be quite negative about this whole thing, it did not anticipate the actual ‘overall’ negativity.
According to Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey, people working at Oculus VR got death threats and harassing phone calls that extended to their families, something that is obviously shocking given the fact that we’re talking about a PC peripheral and not a cure for cancer or something like that.
“We expected a negative reaction from people in the short term, we did not expect to be getting so many death threats and harassing phone calls that extended to our families.” said Palmer and continued:
“We know we will prove ourselves with actions and not words, but that kind of shit is unwarranted, especially since it is impacting people who have nothing to do with Oculus.”
It will be interesting to see whether Sony will now consider releasing its VR device on the PC platform, and whether Oculus’ opponents will be able to attract more customers given the recent events.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I wasn’t happy with facebook taking my toy but this is nuts.
Video games are the next great entertainment medium! Unless I feel the need to make myself look better than other people – then they’re just toys. Unless they involve subject matter I don’t agree with – then they’re serious business. Unless…
This is getting ridiculous.
Valve buying Oculus would be a good thing. Only good that will come out of this is the hype it’s going to bring about the VR market. I’m crossing my fingers that Valve will consider pushing out their own VR headset and give us what we’ve been hoping for.
Faith in the gaming community has been dashed thoroughly once again. Setting us back in the public image of the rest of the world by 100 years just as Twilight set females back 100 years.
also add the fact taht faith in game developers has completly gone the last few years and you might understand why people are so pissed.
I have faith in many studios that have yet to let me down, I just simply don’t misplace it like majority of people do as well as not to have such idiotically high expectations of ‘never’ getting boned ever. Business trumps individualistic logic of people thinking a studio or developer does things only for that one individual, but even if that makes sense as a whole. People will still be pissed off and then look for an excuse to justify it with an alternate agenda that has nothing to do with the likeliness that their original hissy fit was because of something completely trivial – then they’ll find whatever reason to justify their hatred.
Woop. People are predictable, my faith are in people like Frictional Games or Almost Human Games or in faith in Kojima even though at the time most people are hate-wagoning and moaning about betrayal still from the Sutherland fiasco and then Ground Zeroes ‘price’. People will moan and lose faith for trivial things, though this kind of story shows just how bad the moaning can get when it clumps into a Sheeple-Cluster of angry twits who have nothing better to do then engulf their self-entitled and wounded egos together to form an obnoxiously-angry mob with pitchforks and torches.
“People are predictable”
Then why did you put faith in the gaming community in the first place? Did you WANT your hopes dashed?
I could be wrong, but I think you’re just wanting to look like you’re on the moral high ground.
People are predictable, yes. However, that doesn’t mean I will remain cynical, we always have to balance the negatives with a positive, even if the positive is unrealistic, it’s not wanting ones faith to be dashed because with faith or hope in something, we’d have no future or never move forward. “Wanting your hopes dashed” is rather, if you have high expectations of something, having faith or hope in things is not the same as having high expectations which I think is what you were confusing the two for.
I treat everyone at a neutral level as I am unless they somehow, individually, prove it in some way or another that they are greater, similar or lesser :L No one is lesser or greater without evidence as that’d be stupid XD
i dont know, ken levine closing down his studio to make pc indie games wasnt very predictable. Seems the industry is heading to a diffirent direction.
When I said ‘People’ are predictable, I meant that towards the majority consumer base, not industry-staples/staff/people/developers/studio heads.
Businesses Can very much be unpredictable because we never get the full stories, ever, or only are told what they want public to hear, thus, saying businesses of any sort are predictable would be false and a lie. ‘People’ as human characteristics, mannerisms and relevant to the Times of what is trending and not, are easily marketable and predictable.
Well it’s been restored by all my Kickstarters especially Star Citizen and if the DFM is as good as hoped I’m not complaining.
oculus was kickstarted just saying.
You think I’m playing? (c)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r53zEnHyNPM
No no, these weren’t death threats. This was the Facebook communities way of saying welcome, they’re so misunderstood.
Do you have actual proof that this happened?
What makes you think this never happened?
The gaming community has been toxic for years. Especially the PC gaming scene. (I’m 100% PC gamer and will never abandon PC, but it is also a fact that there are some damn elitist scrubs in this community.)
You can’t imagine the amount of death threats people receive by Twitter. It’s not hard to imagine a very small fraction of gamers will take even bigger steps and harass them by phone.
The downgrade of the Watch Dogs graphics is one of the most recent examples where gamers found a reason to send death threats. It’s sad…
It also happened when the /r/pcmasterrace subbreddit got temporarily banned.
Just because something could or might have happened, doesn’t mean it did.
We could have landed on Mars by now, this doesn’t mean we have.
But we have countless examples that show some PC gamers can get incredibly angry for the smallest things.
I’m all for using the PC Gaming Master Race meme (hell, I even use it as my Youtube avatar) but some people take it way too seriously.
The NeoGAF thread about Facebook buying Oculus, got over 400,000+ views.
It’s not hard to believe there will be a few individuals (I’m talking about 5 or so) who take further steps to express their anger. And there always are sadly…
Way to completely invalidate the shit you said by acting like it is only PC players that get upset when they are betrayed.
Just because I said a pig flew into my yard doesn’t actually mean a pig flew into my yard. This seems fishy tbh.
faked,for more attention
Cue Nelson from The Simpsons- Ha Ha Palmers a sellout! What’s that? 2 billion you say? Oh shit…..
suck my d…
Ah, yes – insane people. What can you do?
None of these pathetic people would do this in person. The internet makes everyone a toughguy. Im as pissed about this deal as anyone but this is absolutely disgusting.
Seriously WTF
This is really ridiculous. but “We expected a negative reaction from people in the short term”… “short term”… ya, cause people are sheep, after a short term they are going to accept it and going to be happy with facebook in everything… seriously wtf is going on with this guy…
Negative reaction in the short term probably means that they will prove in the long term that all the doubt and fears of these so called “gamers” (that are actually a disgrace to every gamer) are not justified and will be proven false
They could also prove the exact opposite if there are leaks or whisltes are blown within FB that data mining is taking place of Oculus users.
It could go either way and the trust that Oculus VR had in the community has been lost all the same.
I’ll tell you a story the few 1st games are going to be just like you want and what i want but the next wave of games you have an optional facebook integration the 3rd wave BOOOM everything need a facebook account & ads ads ads ads… and you’ll see…
This is just rubbish. I’m no fan of the Facebook-Oculus deal, but I recognise their right to do it, and wish them luck. Makes you half support the idea of something like Prism, to punish the idiots that do this kind of thing.
I’d like to see some “Actual Proof” that this happened. This gives all
gamers a very bad name, and since this is a very serious accusation, I
want to see actual proof.
VR is a great add on for gaming, but it’ll never take off. It’ll be expensive at launch and it’ll probably stay expensive. VR has been on the go for years. SEGA had VR tech ready for the Mega Drive 20 years ago. I’m not sure how long VR has been out there, but all these years on, it’s never cemented itself in gaming. All of a sudden it’s popped up out of nowhere once again. Health issues will probably plague it. Even the 3DS has health issues, so VR needs a miracle.
Really did you just write that in pixie dust while in Cloud Cuckoo land !!
VR is as cheap as chips to most PC owners I am paying over 300 quid for a graphics card alone and that’s not top of the range and that’s the price range for Oculus in dollars.
There is also many games devs commited to VR and computing power and tech has caught up to make it a reality,also realise VR is not just for gaming that is the start fully expect VR to be the next revolution since social networking it’s going to be that big.
Such a shame seems some people are slightly unstable,I think a possible war with Russia just averted,is something to get up set about not a PC device,and Oculus did deliver the product but some feel they need to cancel DK2 even with out letting the dust settle.
Oculus is still in it’s infancy and so is VR and True Player Gear with project Totem is another player on the field and there will be many more, as VR is going to be worth billions in the future so plenty of options if you really are certain Facebook is the devil incarnate.
To all of you people asking for proof, you are never going to get it. This is the new media where they can put anything on the net, with or without proof, all to generate clicks. Not to mention I wouldn’t be surprised if Oculus put this kind of shit out to generate sympathy after how much they pissed off the people that believed in them.
Also I would like to translate what that Oculus dev said “We did expect people to get mad at us selling out and betraying the Kickstarter backers, but we did not expect the
consequences from people getting mad at us selling out and betraying the
Kickstarter backers.” Good work Oculus. Thanks for giving the hope of big corporation free, open source VR and throwing it against the wall. Now we get to have that VR like in Futurama, where it will be riddled with ads. Whenever you are playing a game you will get a nice little ad, off to the side of course because we don’t want to be TOO intrusive, “Want to get better at slaughtering your enemies? Try Brawndo!” Not to mention the sheer amount of data mining that can be done for the NSA and Facebook, everything you look at, everything you interact with, Facebook will know and through them their buddies over at the NSA.
I always wanted to live in the Shadowrun Universe. Oh wait, no I didn’t.
“Not to mention I wouldn’t be surprised if Oculus put this kind of shit
out to generate sympathy after how much they pissed off the people that
believed in them. ”
That’s was SO fascinating. Now please, get back under your dirty bridge, troll.
Thank you for providing proof showing the victimization of Oculus. Why don’t you climb right back up Zuckerbergs ass?
Ignorant idiots with no lives…this is what fanboyism and brand loyalty does and it’s disgusting. People need to stop living their lives through videogames or having videogames become their lives like the majority of these fanboys, all so pathetic.
wow ur so cool
calling these ignorant ppl as no lyfers and pathetic
u shud get a trophy for ur post
Wow, you’re so cool, ironically congratulating this person in order to call them out on something you don’t like while not bothering to type real English like a normal person. You should get a trophy for your post.
WOW you’re all arguing over something that doesn’t matter instead of banding together to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen. Let’s WAKE UP shall we?
I love how people with high profile niche products that they build and build and build hype over the course of years of constant promises (that are later gone back on) now use “death threats against family” as their ultimate excuse to get people off their backs.
Used to be, people just accepted that if you built up the hype around something and promised something for a small group of fanatical people who are throwing money at you to do something unusual, that if you then sold them out… well, there would be a small percentage of those already fanatically obsessed people who might turn to something less than acceptable as their response.
Seems like he loved their diehard zealotry until it turned on him. Live by the sword, get harassed in the middle of the night by the sword. Not saying it’s right. Just saying that’s how it goes.
Perhaps he should not have made such grandiose promises of not selling out six months before he sold out and years after he promised the sun and the stars and the moon and the heavens.
Hyping something beyond what is reasonable does have costs. One of those is when the nutjobs come out and start wiggin’ out. Again, it’s not right.
It just is.
MUTHAFREAKING TERRY!!!! 😀
Why is Oculus getting the death threats? You’d think Zuckerburg would be getting them.
Its not like nobody didn’t see this coming, in terms of the reaction. The product was cherished by the core gamer and the expectation was from the get-go set to it being an open platform that would not be maintained by any partner other than Oculus VR.
With its acquisition by facebook, which is notorious for being dishonest with its users and harvesting their data for advertisement money, it comes as no surprise that simply death threats happened.
Furthermore, they are lucky that this is taking place in simply the video game industry where death threats have a very low follow-through rate.
Switching to SONY, i vote with my money not words with this stupidy
Dont BUY IT, thats all. People just get crazy for anything these days.
Why don’t YOU provide proof first, troll? You’re the one making the accusations.
It is the job of the victim to provide proof of them being harassed, I see no proof so I won’t believe it.
Not believing is fine. Accusing the “victim” of lying is not.
Not believing what the victim is claiming is saying that they are, wait for it, lying. So you saying that it is fine that I don’t believe them but I shouldn’t accuse them of lying are statements that directly contradict each other.
Also I’m not required to have proof that they lied, they are required to have proof that they were harassed. You can’t go to the police and claim someone did something to you without some form of proof.
“Not believing what the victim is claiming is saying that they are, wait for it, lying.”
— Oh interesting, do elaborate hoe you came to that conclusion, starting with the definitions of belief and lies. I’m all fucking ears here.
“Also I’m not required to have proof that they lied, they are required to have proof”
— You mean just like how I’m supposed to think you’re a troll running off his mouth without proof?
“You can’t go to the police and claim someone did something to you without some form of proof.”
— Except you’re not the police and nothing similar to a lawkeeper. Next reason please.