Facebook buys Oculus. Huh??

The Game Room
21

Ok, but now they have a corporation behind them with 8 times Sony’s market cap. It’s not like Sony is some paragon of user respect, either.

At any rate, VR headsets are still just dumb display devices, like a monitor. There’s nothing Facebook can do to them to ruin them. I’ll almost certainly buy the consumer model when it comes out, and I fully expect that it’ll be just as open and usable as the dev kits are now.

Sony doesn’t seem to be courting indy devs at all with their unit. If you want something you can tinker with on a PC, there probably won’t be a choice (well, we’ll see about Valve, but they don’t seem to be interesting in actually building their own headset).

22

Well, actually it seems like Sony DOES want to court indies with their headset.

Anyway, competitors seem to be coming out of the woodwork now, since True Player Gear seems to be adding their name to the pile as well. So uh… maybe Oculus wasn’t as far ahead as everyone thought, they’ve just been the most open about where they stand.

23

Does he have a beef with Facebook/Zuckerberg or something ?

24

Yes. I have to be careful with what I say due to NDA, but in my job at Sony I’m working with several indie developers who are already working toward supporting the Morpheus.

That said, it’s true that you won’t be able to just go out and BUY a Morpheus dev kit. It’s like getting access to a PlayStation dev kit … you’ll need to be a registered developer.

25

That’s unfortunate. When I think indie I think of individual developers and the maker community, not just registered developers (even small ones).

There’s some more big news for Oculus: Michael Abrash joined as Chief Scientist. Carmack+Abrash is pretty much the best combo you can imagine: they were responsible for Quake back in the day.

26

Sure; But Sony has been generally trying to make getting dev kits easier lately, as best as I can tell, so…

27

Er, not to disrespect these gentlemen, but was Quake really that groundbreaking? Really? I mean, when I think “Amazing technical breakthroughs in gaming” Quake isn’t the first thing that leaps to mind.

28

Really? Quake was pretty much the first true 3D shooter out there. It was out before even the original Voodoo Graphics, and initially relied on its software renderer. There was nothing else like it at the time (well, there was Descent, but that was a pretty different game).

29

Yeah, Quake was a ground-breaker.

30

Oh absolutely. It’s not hard getting a PlayStation dev kit, and I expect it won’t be hard to get a Morpheus dev kit once production ramps up. But it’s not “consumer-product easy”. You can’t just buy a dev kit at Best Buy and noodle around with it the way you can with a PC.

31

What does it take to get a PS3 dev-kit? Is it more difficult if one wants a PS4 dev-kit?

32

The PS developer site gives these requirements as a start:

  • Form a Corporate Entity
  • Obtain an Employer Tax ID Number (see www.irs.gov) (Recommended)
  • Static IP (Required for DevNet Access)
  • You must be physically located in US, Mexico, Central America, South America, or Canada

Already those seem like pretty severe restrictions for anyone that just wants to play around.

33

This requirement is an artifact of how Sony dices up the world internally. SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) sells into those territories, so if you sign up as a developer with SCEA you need to be in the Americas. If you’re in Asia or Europe you’d sign up with SCEJ (Sony Computer Entertainment Japan) or SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe). I don’t remember who handles Africa. Probably SCEE.

But yeah, it’s easy if you’re a company. Dev kits aren’t set up to be consumer products.