Oculus nooooooooooooo!

Can't agree with you because of this old story. Though I agree with Mark Zuckerberg. People who upload their personal information to some Internet service and believe it's care about their privacy are dumb. Any unencrypted data become public domain once it's leave offline storage.

And about Oculus I totally sure they will be fine with Facebook. They didn't bought trademark, hardware or software, but their team so I suppose they'll do anything to keep them together. It's might be better if VR was driver by some vendor-neutral company, but Facebook clearly not worse company that might buy them.

Because everyone wanted to carry one of these around when they came out. Super convenient.

What are your thoughts on Double Fine running out of it's KS funds then using Steam Early Access to get more funding? Then on top of that because they "designed a too big of a game for this budget" and decided to release the game in an episodic fashion similar to Telltale games.

Heck yes! The brick phone WAS super convenient! If you were lucky, you could have one installed in your car, but this one was for busy folks on-the-go!

I've been told, "making games is hard."

Anyone who thinks a Kickstarter goal (even if it goes over) is the same thing as a budget should look at actual budgets for games, even independent ones.

Anyone who thinks a company shouldn't sell a game because it got Kickstarted should make sure that's part of the Kickstarter commitment that the company makes.

I know you're not endorsing either of those, DS, but I've seen so many "You've beat your KS goal by over a million dollars!! What do you need more money for?!" Making games is hard, and expensive. Especially when you're making something hugely ambitious, with lots of crazy talented, veteran people on your team.

I know I'm so deep in the forest, I often forget that people don't know what the trees look like, but it blows my mind that more people don't understand "20+ people building a game for 18 - 24 months costs a bit of money".

Oculus falls under the umbrella of my prior post, by the way. That's a company full of remarkably talented people. $2 billion dollars means they can now just focus on making an amazing product, without worrying if they get a product to market in three months or zomg they're out of money.

As a for instance.

For clarity, Oculus' motives aren't in question here - it's Facebook's motives that concern me.

It's impossible to know the future, but I'd put money on Facebook's motives being "Highly lucrative, disruptive tech they want a piece of". I seriously don't think it's much more shady than that. Now, the apps you end up deciding to run on it, especially Facebook VR edition? I'd be very wary of that stuff if you spend a lot of time worrying about online privacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction#Prediction_in_science

Oh hush.

For the record, you did this thread wrong. If you did it right it would've started with:

I don't really think anyone's trying to say that making games is cheap.

I feel part of the problem is, a lot of the kickstarter campaigns heavily imply "this is what we need to make this game", not "this is what we need just to get the ball rolling". It's hard to feel bad for projects receiving flak for money mismanagement, when creators weren't clear with how much money they'd need in the first place. You just can't expect people to know your goal is not enough.

Obviously, hitting unexpected roadbumps is just part of game development, so I can't say devs are entirely to blame. The rest of the problem resides with the backers, imo. Too many people are treating kickstarter as a preorder store, instead of the donation gathering website that it is. This amplifies every mistake the devs make, because they've got thousands of people expecting a good and finished game, when it's just not realistic for every ks game to turn out well.

I think it has more to do with people not understanding what kind of money we're talking about. By far most people find $10K a lot of money, but for a company that's just to pay the gas and electric bill. The kind of money a company need to run is not something a lot of people are aware of. Because they don't usually work with that kind of money.

ACCOUNTANCY COURSES FOR EVERYBODY!

ha ha

I didn't say it was betrayal. Betrayal would imply that they didn't come through on their promises - which they did so far. The problem is what selling out to Facebook implies. Facebook is known to be greedier than the NSA when it comes to storing everybodies data. And that's saying something.. ;P

Btw, a bit off topic but hilarious: Zuckerberg calling Obama to complain about the NSA internet sniffing. That's like smallpox complaining about flu killing too many people. Zuckerberg white-knighting for internet privacy. The audacity! I bet Obama was all like "WTF 0.o"

For me selling out to Facebook means I won't touch the OR. Not because Facebook is 'evil' but because you can't trust them to keep private data safe. They have a track record for shoddy software that lets everybody and his dog take a peek into your private section and they will happily sell information to the highest bidder. Google is not much better but I think they at least try to build reliable software that protects you from Joe Sixpack being able to read your private stuff.

There are some implications selling your company or product idea to certain large companies. I think the only reason Facebook has not interfered with some stuff they bought is that they know everybody is watching them. Just give it some time. Zuckerberg doesn't give a flying f... about the privacy of his users.

This. I simply can't imagine that Facebook will NOT leave their mark on Oculus. They won't ignore such an opportunity for long. Just long enough for the buzz to die down.

nope nope nope nope nope nope nope

Just saying.

Nope.

Are you familiar with the concept of hyperbole?

NO WAY! WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS WORD OF WHICH YOU SPEAK!? I HAVE NEVER HEARD SUCH A PHRASE!