I see this as extremely good news.
Positives of Facebook entering into VR race:
- Oculus now has infinite budget to craft perfect hardware, software and entire VR platform for PC and portables
- Countless more developers will become interested in VR, short byte-size games will find much larger audience on VR
- VR promotion on Facebook.com = MILLIONS of VR adopters on day 1
- More VR users of all kinds = more AAA games for us PC gamers
- Immediate infusion of entertainment/documentary/travel content
- Holy grail of VR - social networking inside minecraft-esque VR space. Just what Snow Crash depicted in its Metaverse.
- with stylized design, VR metaverse could be run even from iOS/Android phones
- Facebook can sell hardware with loss, providing incredibly HQ hardware for ~$99
- Presence of strong player in VR will force Sony to become very invested in VR, making much more compelling product and enabling 3rd parties much more streamlined patch toward porting games to PS4
Negatives?
So far, none, as long PC gamers get what they were promised [and FB is willing not to interfere with that].
This is good news for VR.
I made some comments in the OT side, and I'll repost them here.
As a start-up, Oculus was cultivating indies, and providing very cheap tools and apis for developers to ensure OR compatibility. FB could now view licensing as a primary revenue stream, and might want to avoid "diluting the brand" with non-AAA games (read, ports galore).
This could be good if FB is willing to go hard enough into a new market that they'd let OR go to retail at a loss.
Remember OR was having trouble getting the high res screens they wanted.
300 dollar 1440p OR? That would be good.
Or does FB mishandle and bungle this whole thing by either forcing it half-baked and early, by demanding a low price point and hardware at profit? Do they sit on this tech? Did they buy them for patents?
Is FB trying to go after the Google glass sphere?
How is FB's relationship with Samsung? Samsung makes all the high res low persistence screens. Does this help or harm OR's access to that hardware?