Did Oculus swipe blueprints from rival? Zuck takes the stand Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg shed new light on the social network's 2014 acquisition of Oculus VR Tuesday in a Dallas federal court. Zuck took the stand as part of a trial between Oculus and ZeniMax, the rival games developer that has accused Oculus of stealing the virtual reality technology that it uses at the heart of its …
I'd be far more interested to see Carmack take the stand. Not only is he the central figure in this, but from what I have seen of him, he is intelligent, lucid and very much able to speak for himself.
Plus of course if it all fails he can presumably whip out a BFG and destroy all the lawyers in the room...
I can believe the claim that a certain person actually had little in the way of tech or prototype.
And that an established game company would have something developed.
And that when there was a hype bandwagon to jump on with a pile of cash attached someone saw an opportunity.
The whole Oculus story has been full of bullshit from the start so an extra helping would at least be consistent.
Only in billionaire-land can you push a major deal that costs 150% of the initial figure without getting fired.
In every other case, there are people analyzing, evaluating, reporting and checking that the deal goes through for the amount initially forecast, otherwise there is hell to pay to explain why there is difference and who is the dimwit that didn't have the experience to plan for it.
But hey, in this case the dimwit is the owner, so what can you say ?
I seem to remember that a few years ago, Ars Technica did a piece on the Virtuix Omni, a VR peripheral that, at the time, actually made VR seem worthwhile. The story, as well as one of the first stories that Ars did on the Oculus Rift showed that even then there was a close connection between ZeniMax (by proxy of ID Software) and Oculus. One of the first games mentioned in the Rift story was Doom 3 and one the use cases for the Virtuix Omni was walking around in Skyrim. Back then Oculus was a hardware company looking for software to showcase their technology, and I'm sure that without the help of ZeniMax/ID it would have taken longer to develop the Rift or the software to showcase it. ZeniMax may not have created the Oculus, but I have little doubt that some of their code or technology made it into Oculus' own when Carmack joined up; John may have developed and written the code, but if he wrote it and developed it while still at ID, then it belongs to them.
I also find the Zuck's assertion that he never before heard of ZeniMax disingenuous at best: how could he not know about the company founded by the husband of Wonder Woman? Implying that ZeniMax is just an opportunistic IP troll is laughable.
It's quite simple really. Zick literally owns most of the world's social data, and is incredibly rich due to his dubious business practices.
Throw in some highly paid 'Yes' men, who reassure Zock that he is absolutely right on anything he says, add a pinch of ultra-highlife, stir well, and bake in an environment devoid of anything that could be considered 'common', and you get the reason he acts the way he does.
Imagine if Facebook were to collapse overnight, and the servers were turned off. I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to state that the Western World would fall to pieces. It would most likely recover of course, but because of the huge number of slender, slightly spindly fingers Zeck has in pretty much every form of media pie? It's quite scary just how much power that company actually has.
Believe me, this whole Oculus thing will go away soon, with or without a huge payoff, and the world will continue to turn on baseless 'Like' clicks just as before.
I'm half expecting Zerk to try and buyout Wikipedia. Somehow, that's a terrifying thought....
FB only takes it gives nothing in return
Yes the third parties who survive off the scraps that fall from zucks table would have a bit of work finding a new audience but their are plenty of suckers and plenty of services collecting them.
Google or Apple for example could be up and running in FB shoes within a month or so and the world wouldn't notice the difference.
Quite: "Imagine if Facebook were to collapse overnight, and the servers were turned off. I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to state that the Western World would fall to pieces.".
I think that's very much an exaggeration!
Facebook may be financially sizeable, but that's almost all (if not all of it) advertising revenue, due to the number of users of the service.
If FB where to suddenly vanish, all that would happen is that people would go elsewhere for their social 'fix', and the advertising revenue would simply go with them.
If I may elaborate on my dramatic point :P
Facebook is more that just a Jeremy Kyle interview room. There are thousands of websites that use it's services for ID, advertising and viral communication.
Many mobile games use FB as their means of making their cash, by getting their name out there, by 'encouraging' players to post on their pages, in turn spreading their name to other people.
These companies would fold overnight.
Social media is as much a part of the internet as a webpage now. I moderate FB pages for the biggest brands in the world, and I can tell you the loss of FB would hurt these companies greatly.
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