Oculus and Facebook

Notch pulled the plug on Oculus VR support the second he heard Facebook bought it. Two billion dollars, done, and the creator of Minecraft just walked away. That tells you something about what everyone expected from Oculus before Zuckerberg showed up.

The Oculus Rift had come out of a Kickstarter campaign and suddenly made VR feel real in a way it hadn’t before. Not the expensive corporate VR of the ’90s, not the arcade experience, but something you could actually have at home, could build games for, could imagine a whole new era of gaming around. The developers believed in it. The players believed in it. There was momentum.

Then Facebook bought the hardware and the team, and Mark Zuckerberg laid out his actual vision: virtual classrooms, virtual stadiums filled with ads, all that surveillance-ready stuff that makes Facebook, Facebook. Not games. Not what the community that built Oculus cared about.

Notch’s response was blunt. He didn’t want to be part of Facebook’s machine. He didn’t want his work—his carefully engineered dream—to feed into whatever Zuckerberg was building. Neither did anyone else who’d been in that Kickstarter community.

What gets me about acquisitions like this isn’t the money part. It’s that every time a big company with different priorities buys something beautiful and independent, something dies. Not the product—the thing stays, the hardware runs—but the vision. The reason people cared in the first place. The belief that this could belong to us, that the future could be something other than an optimized revenue stream.

Maybe the competition will pick it up. Maybe someone else will build the VR future that Oculus promised and Facebook buried. But Notch was right to leave. Once it’s Facebook’s thing, it’s not your thing anymore, no matter what they build with it.