What to Make of the Oculus Book, or the Face Rift?

Hello gaming friends of the internet, now that the smoke has cleared and the rage-gauges have dialed themselves down to normal and functionally communicative levels, I'd like to take a look at Facebook's absorption of the famed Oculus Rift and it's development team

After Oculus Rift's purchase by Facebook, the soul sucking corporation whose one and only goal is to know and control all your information and eventually the world as we know it! Gamer's were up in arms, taking to the streets, burning cars and murdering puppies, punching old ladies and stealing families mail! Alright, so that may be a bit of an exaggeration to say the least, but the amount of explosive rage and irrational anger that came from this particular purchase announcement burned like white-hot plasma for approximately two whole days, then cooled off into a non-existent footnote in the year that is 2014's game development season. Just as quickly as it started, it seemed to be over. I thought that it would be a very interesting topic to explore, however I wanted to wait on this subject for a bit, with strong opinions of both sides of the fence, it would have been very easy for my message to be misconstrued.

Now, I don't have facebook. In fact I fucking hate facebook. It's a waste of time and largely full of idiotic, under researched opinions from the four corners of the internet. You don't have to share my opinion. I understand 100 percent that there are indeed some useful features in Facebook, just not features I think useful enough to subject myself to so much trash information. With that opinion forever out there, galvanized for everyone to see, Zuckerberg revolutionized internet communication and gave everyone their own little space to call their own a "Home Page" that, for many actually felt like home. A place where your friends contact you and also pushed a unified (be it clunky as all holy fuck sometimes,) system that everyone could easily learn use. What Facebook and Zuckerberg did for social networking that their competition couldn't do for this medium, and still can't do (I'm looking at you, Google,) was no less than amazing.

All of that is all but irrelevant when we discuss the topic of the Oculus Rift. People should maybe, be slightly weary of the Oculus purchase. Not necessarily because backers should feel betrayed, or because the hardware was purchased by some giant, frightening Corporate strongman. What people should be wary about is this one very simple fact. Facebook has not once yet dabbled in consumer grade electronics. We should be taking a "wait and see" attitude towards the Rift now simply because the company that bought-out the Rift for a bargain at what now amounts to less than 2 Billion dollars has just jumped in the hardware market without so much as even testing the waters, specifically the gaming hardware market. Mr. Zuckerberg has vision, I'll give him that, but the O.R. team may not have actually made a smart move here, sure they got stock options, and a boatload of cash in relative terms, but the connection that Facebook has to gaming at this point is tenuous at best. Facebook "games" have been a time sink and the laughing stock of the internet since they came out, hardcore and casual gamers alike both agreed that facebook gaming was not in fact gaming at all, which you may agree with or not, depending on how much time you've sunk into things like farmville.

What gamers should be worried about is the lost potential of the Rift now that it's own by a large company that simply doesn't fit the hardware they've purchased, not now at least. Zuckerberg's vision, stated that he saw people getting together through VR headsets and communicating in a virtual world with one another. Now, this idea is hardly revolutionary for starters. We've had things like "Second Life" for years, and "Playstation Home," yeah Sony basically updated the idea of "Second Life," already as well. You build an avatar, could buy trade and sell objects, communicate with friends and even party up to game together. The only thing "new" about Mr. Zuckerberg's vision that we know of is that it's introducing the Oculus Rift into the mix. It's nothing but Facebook coupled with digital worlds, worlds that, at the very least already exist in some fashion somewhere else; and a new piece of hardware that, frankly at the moment is nothing more than a gimmicky pipe-dream that hasn't even remotely realized a faction of it's own potential.

Now, please don't take this the wrong way. I am not bashing on the Rift because I think that it is going to be a repeat of the mid-90's VR crash. Any of you old enough to remember the promises that Virtual Reality developers made will know that they fell hard and flat on their faces. What I am worried about is the development team and owners of the project's own short-sighted vision may have accidently handicapped their own product. Not on purpose, mind you. The fact still very much remains that Facebook has not made a play in ANY hardware market, let alone the competitive market that exists in gaming. Facebook also has sort of a bad habit of implementing changes that users don't want, or have not been fleshed out enough to make users happy. This is a problem with Facebook's digital environment that cannot make it's way over to the hardware side of things. People deal with this on the facebook website since the site is "free," but if you've paid $250.00 or more for the Oculus for a buggy, virtualized Facebook client you're most likely going to be pretty pissed off. This won't spell the end for consumer accessible Virtual Reality, but it will mean the end of the Oculus Rift as a piece of hardware that people take seriously.

Is it fair for us to discount the Rift after it's been purchased by Facebook? No, without a doubt that would just be short-sighted and ignorant of anyone who is at all curious about this renewed hardware landscape. What it should do though is make you a little bit more wary of what will become of the project now that Oculus Rift has been moved into a major corporate playground where ideas can change drastically, promises are forgotten and products themselves can completely evolve into something else altogether more amazing, or abysmal.

Oculus Rift does have some competition to in being the first to market though as well. Sony has jumped right on board with their own headset that will supposedly work with the PS4 and maybe even PC's. Sony's design is admittedly much more sleek looking than the Rift, as many Sony products do a wonderful job of combining form and function. WIth this in mind though, Sony is still behind the 8-ball though. The Oculus team has well over a year's head start on Sony in development, but maybe selling to a large corporate entity was the only way they thought they could compete.

While their logic is arguably flawed, staring down a giant like Sony who is knocking on your door is more intimidating that myself, or most of us can even imagine. It is hard to completely fault the team for selling themselves off to someone who they think could compete more easily. What I am not convinced about though and still remains to be seen is that if Facebook is the right choice and if they can actually compete with The Gaming Giant, Sony. If Zuckerberg's opening plan is to sell a $250.00 virtual reality social networking headset, without other third party, major developer support on release day one, then I think the sad fact is they won't be able to match up. Still, I'd like to be cautiously optimistic that Facebook's entry into the hardware market will be marked with the success of a well-polished, fun, exciting and experience-changing peripheral. Only time will tell, I suppose.