Minecraft creator, Markus 'Notch' Persson has withdrawn his support of Oculus Rift in the wake of the company's acquisition by Facebook for $2bn (£1.2bn). "I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook," he stated in a blog post reacting to the news. "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."
As part of that Kickstarter investment, Notch's reward tier offered a day at the Oculus offices -- something which he says "was every bit as impressive as you could imagine" and which provoked a surge of excitement about working with virtual reality.
However, his misgivings about Facebook's involvement have caused him to withdraw his support for the project and to cancel talks about bringing Minecraft to Rift. "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."
Other developers are more enthusiastic about the acquisition.
For example Vlambeer's Rami Ismail told The Guardian, "We may all know of them in the tech scene, but outside of our bubble nobody has ever heard of them. If VR is to be established as a market, we need the average consumer to know of it, so having Facebook and Sony in the fray is good news. "Oculus needed a backer that has huge mindshare, a lot of money, a lot of technological credibility and access to great software and hardware facilities. To be honest, I'm not even surprised Oculus was sold, I'm more surprised that Facebook ended up being the highest bidder."
Notch's post suggests that he will now be looking at the competitors to Rift on the virtual reality scene in order to explore the potential of the medium.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
