Oculus Sold to Facebook

It was announced today that Facebook will buy Oculus, the company working on the really cool video game VR accessory, for $2 Billion. This is actually broken up into $400 million cash and $23.1 million shares of Facebook stock at about $64.10 per share (at today's closing). Oculus gets an additional $300 million if the accessory performs well. That is all well and good for them, but what does that mean for us? I have some speculation on this (and it is just that), and believe it or not, they are not all that negative!

First off, I think this means we may actually see the Oculus Rift hit stores sooner then would have previously been possible. While the owners of Oculus did sell the company, what this can really be looked as, is one hell of a hiring bonus. Oculus is still going to work on the Rift, but now they have a backer with deep pockets to help get the system out and make it successful. As it is, they have orders for 75,000 development kits, and now they can, in theory, get them built faster. And the faster devs get their kits, the sooner games will be made/adopted for the peripheral so it can hit store shelves.

Secondly, this may give a cheaper option for the Rift then would have been possible, and this could be due to what everyone is worried about; advertisements. Now people give Facebook a lot of crap for all the ads they have on their site; But think about it for a second. How much money does the average user give Facebook? I mean unless I am advertising for The Gameslave I don't give them a dime, yet some how they have the server infrastructure to support 1,310,000,000 users and 54,200,000 pages (http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/). Now lets compare the Rift to another device that has become super popular, the Kindle Fire. You can buy an ad supported version of it, or for some extra cash, get it ad free. What if Facebook offered a cheaper version of the Rift that played a VR ad when you loaded a game? Now they could step too far and make ads like commercial breaks where they interrupt the experience and that could ruin the entire thing. It is a fine line they may be walking here.

Now for the doom part of this. We may see, and a shutter to say this, VR Facebook games. Last thing I need is for someone to send me an invite to Farmville: Rift or Poker Deluxe VR. I ignore these as it is and don't want to see a bunch of notices to play them.

So yeah, these are my speculations on the Rift. What do you all think?