from Hacker News

Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

by bjenik on 3/25/14, 10:56 PM with 50 comments

  • by froo on 3/26/14, 1:20 AM

    Sony announces Project Morpheus 6 days ago. Oculus sells to Facebook today and deal started 5 days ago (apparently).

    This is either

    a) Founders saw writing on the wall and decided to get paid early rather than have to compete with a company with much deeper pockets and a preexisting fanbase.

    b) Facebook saw that Sony's announcement validated the space and decided to buy the company with most mindshare at the moment as it is an asset.

    People have wondered why Microsoft didn't buy the company? Well, Oculus have seen what, $90M in funding so far? The investors would have wanted what.. 5X 10X ROI?

    At 5X.. $450M is a metric fuckton (excuse the language) of money that they could throw at in-house development of something similar. I imagine having a VR kit that integrates heavily with Kinect has the potential to be huge, so they at least have to be thinking about it.

  • by psbp on 3/25/14, 11:23 PM

    "Zuckerberg explained that he felt that Oculus represented an entirely new post-PC and post-mobile platform."

    He's probably right. While Google and others are focusing on half-baked wearables as their key to the future, facebook just bought a huge chunk of the most likely successor.

  • by mtgx on 3/25/14, 11:39 PM

    That makes Palmer look even more like a greedy bastard, and that all he cared about was money all along. When he heard the $2 billion amount he was probably like: "So you want us to kill all of our gaming plans now, or should we wait a year to lay it easy on the fans?"

  • by ucha on 3/25/14, 11:48 PM

    >> Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, recused himself from the negotiations.

    I would really like to understand how these sort of conflicts of interest are dealt with and if they are investigated by the SEC/other government body...

  • by zakelfassi on 3/26/14, 2:09 AM

    A $2B deal over five days ... sure. A 100K funding takes at least 2months. And, check this > http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wf6mg/so_no_way_to_...

  • by deletes on 3/26/14, 12:04 AM

    I can't comprehend that John Carmack is now working for facebook.

  • by Gravityloss on 3/25/14, 11:59 PM

    To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million?

    Maybe it is so hard.

  • by newhouseb on 3/26/14, 1:31 AM

    I'm sure this just means that the legal back and forth happened over five days, not that the deal started five days ago.

    This recode article has more detail which makes this much less of a sensationalist story: http://recode.net/2014/03/25/in-googles-shadow-facebooks-zuc...

  • by o0-0o on 3/26/14, 12:56 AM

    Virtual reality will never be reality.

  • by sarreph on 3/26/14, 12:23 AM

    I wouldn't be surprised if a sense of awe of Zuck showing interest in the project helped shelve initial doubts about working with/for such a behemoth.

  • by barrkel on 3/25/14, 11:22 PM

    I wonder if something (or somebody) forced this.