You seen what people spend on smart phones, tablets, and video games lately?

I wonder how mobile games are supposed to bring in money at all. It seems like the market has forced them to $0.00 and are all ad supported, leaving nothing but gimmicky low-effort games.

nVidia and AMD would like a word with you. They'll handle some software sure, but they sure as hell better keep up with the hardware space too, or some other competitor will come along and beat them out with something "better".

As it is now, Oculus answers to Facebook. Facebook answers to their shareholders, and are legally obligated to maximize profits. If that means they have to use less expensive parts with a shorter shelf-life and quicker obsolescence, all the better (for them). A profit-driven company like Facebook isn't going to throw $2,000,000,000 at an up-and-coming startup and then leave them alone.

Facebook isn't interested in VR, they're interested in using VR to make money. And can you honestly say Facebook would want Oculus to take the time to make a quality product using quality parts to make "the best VR headset possible", rather than to use the cheapest parts they can get away with so they can have it release sooner to get a return on their 2 billion dollar investment? Oculus now, instead of being able to make a good product with the parts they can afford, has to answer to corporate CEOs (who likely know nothing of VR tech, or its needs) about why they're spending money on good parts rather than going with something not as good but cheaper.

Oculus getting a $2 billion injection also doesn't mean they have more money to spend on making a better product like they want. It means they have more money to spend that they must make back. Imagine if Oculus had stayed their course and got a consumer unit out after spending a total of $10 to $20 million, and managed to make back $30 or $40 million in sales. Fairly successful, yeah? Now with Facebook they can spend $200 to $400 million (or more) to get a consumer version out, but what if they manage $100 to $150 million in sales? That would more more successful than the other attempt, maybe it was even a better quality product, but the net result is a failure because they spent more in the process.

Or hell, it doesn't even have to be a technical failure. Imagine Oculus spends $300 million or so to get a product out, and make back about $320 million in sales. Same profit margin as before, but Facebook thinks they aren't making the kind of profits they can be. So despite being successful on paper, Facebook calls it a failure because they only made $20 million instead of $100+ million in profits.

Protip: Valve is addressing this issue. Valve started actually trying to write real games against those proprietary drivers, reported bugs and performance issues to the vendors, and the vendors fixed those issues. Valve then reported their games running faster on Linux in a short amount of time than they do on Windows after having much much more time for optimization, as well as their personnel having more experience programming games, for Windows.

I'm not challenging the idea that Facebook acquiring this "Oculus Rift" company is bad for the product and consumers. I fully agree. Facebook is a poison. I'm sure that within a few months we will see them poisoning the stream. $2 billion is a lot of money to spend. There is absolutely no way that they can make that back in a single product life-cycle. Especially for an unproven technology. There will be early adopters, but many more skeptical passers. And unless the product revolutionizes gaming it will probably never be able to return that $2 billion. That was probably an irresponsible amount of money to spend.

Insert: It reminds me a little bit of Wii, which was wildly popular (albeit, unfounded, which is probably the only hope Facebook has of making its money back). I really doubt that it was able to make that kind of profit. That was a gaming console, not a controller. I'm not sure whether that works for or against the "Oculus Rift".

Facebook should probably be investing this ridiculous cash that it's burning on philanthropic ventures instead. Legitimate ones though. Not the ones where it looks philanthropic, but you're really just laundering money amongst rich people.

Anyway, I highly doubt that Facebook will support or encourage open source drivers. Hardware is inherently expensive to design and manufacture, and difficult to profit on even when it's really really good at what it does (e.g., video cards, CPUs, motherboards). People do not have money trees. There is a limit to how much they can afford to spend, and the things that they can afford to spend money on.

Insert: The open source drivers will probably suffer the same problems that they do with GPU drivers: the detailed specs of the product would give away proprietary secrets necessary for monopolizing the product so they'll be suboptimal and lack features, at best. Meanwhile, the companies involved will exploit the proprietary angle to actually make their money.

We'll see. Honestly, I barely know anything about Oculus Rift so evidently I must have thought it was going to fail to begin with. I certainly don't think that Facebook will be good for them.

Append:

Generally speaking I'm skeptical of motion controls and virtual reality in general. Give me something like the holodeck on Star Trek: TNG and I'm sold. Anything short will probably disappoint me.

@KittyKat
You way of reasoning is sound, but lacks some aspects of FB as a financial backer to Oculus.
FB will NOT want direct returns off the crude 2B$ in VR sales, that IMO would be crazy...FB's intent SHOULD be to increase OVERALL revenues by leveraging the new "platform" that shall come out using the new controller. New unprecedented User Esperience, that in a number of ways increased revenues (more pricy ads, more effective Product placement, paid VR services (but WHICH ONES??))

So generally speaking, making it CLEAR that to me it's not that evil FB will crush the intents of once-pure-and-uncorrupted Oculus VR.

More like...if FB was a Gaming-oriented company, I'd be more confident that there would be paths the Rift could go over to uncover that new user experience that's supposed to increase revenues. In the tenth of millions PROFIT ranges thou, not in the hundreds or, spare me, THOUSANDS of millions.

It's quite obvious that the real aim of VR is to get as much pervasive as social-networks are striving to are (FB leads there, no?), so there is a convergence of targets, but where I see divergence is in the paths the two things are bound to follow:

• social interaction is now a blurred 'action' between the likes of sending an SMS, tagging a photo you've just taken with your smartphone, tweet-feed the status of your commute train line and a heck of other "snips" you can do with the pervasive tech we have at hand right now, and can only get 'better' (or 'worse', as the case may be)

  
  

• Virtual Reality is....er...something not yet as defined an Experience as one would think. Sure thing it will NOT be that much pervasive anytime soon.

'soon' being the Keyword here....when FB will return into the 2 billions? I can only imagine a very long term ROI here...

I sincerely hope there's a master biz plan under those 2 billion, I sincerely do....but I can't help being pessimist.

Now this horse has been beaten enuff.

These aren't drivers you install. They are built into the application in user-space. Having one open source version means every game for eternity can use that same open source version, or a fork of it. These drivers are not complex. I rolled my own version in a matter of hours. I've said this many times already but it doesn't seem to sink in.

Eh, why am I bothering to argue with people who don't even know the product and who haven't been following the company?

Anyway, Bams, you should try the thing out. It is very impressive. Although, we have the holodeck thing now as well. CastAR is a thing Valve was working on, until they the person in charge got fed up with the culture and left. Now Valve is working on something different, with CastAR being part of it's own company. It is equally impressive tech.

http://facerift.ko-opmode.com/