Oculus Refund.

4 points·shaurya··3 comments

Oculus: Is it not a good idea if the founders of Oculus give some part of the profit to the initial backers in kickstarters.

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I'm so confused about this whole thing -- Supporting Oculus in Kickstarter did not entitle those people to any equity in the company, they received exactly the level of reward that they chose. Why would they think that?

This is an interesting question, worthy of some psychological/sociological research, I think.

Certainly people who invested in this must have had some expectations beyond just getting the chosen reward. The primary reward was a developer kit. That's not much good if the product is never offered for sale. So there must have been some expectation of that.

Note that the Rift is still not available for sale. Will it ever be? Maybe not, if Facebook decides to kill it and incorporate the technology into some other project. Will the end result be some DRM'd-to-the-hilt Facebook-games-only device? It's possible.

Going further, I expect that many of the investors had a "we're all in this together" feeling. To be fair, the Kickstarter page[1] encouraged this. Some quotes:

"We hope you share our excitement about virtual reality, the Rift, and the future of gaming."

"... we want to make the Rift available to all game developers, today, so they can be part of the development process. Kickstarter makes that possible. Your voice will be critical to making the Rift hardware and software as great as they can be."

All this is just guessing, by the way. I'm not involved in any of this stuff.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-...

Oculus is owned by a public entity now, it would be a disservice to Facebook shareholders.

The whole situation is FUBAR, wasn't the whole point of crowd sourcing so that companies wouldn't have to sell out like this?

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