VR hype soars as Facebook buys Oculus | 10 Years Ago This Month

28.03.2024 - 15:43 / gamesindustry.biz / John Carmack / Gabe Newell / Andrew Wilson / Cliff Bleszinski / Meta

The modern era of virtual reality as we know it started around June of 2012, when John Carmack brought the Oculus Rift to the Electronic Entertainment Expo and showed it off to attendees with Doom 3 BFG Edition.

It ramped up quickly that August with the launch of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign, which featured testimonials from industry legends like Carmack, Valve's Gabe Newell and Michael Abrash, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, Unity's David Helgason, and David Helgason's popped collar. That campaign started with a $250,000 goal, and ended its run with more than $2.4 million from backers.

VR continued to build hype in the intervening years, but mostly in the background. There was still no commercial product on shelves by March of 2014, and between the exploding (in a good way) mobile market, the exploding (in a bad way) dedicated handheld and Facebook social gaming markets, and the longest-awaited new generation of consoles commanding many of the headlines, there were plenty of other happenings in the market that seemed to take precedence.

In March of 2014, it transitioned from the background of the industry to the foreground as it reached a critical mass of events that nudged it from a far-flung future tech to something that could be just around the corner.

VR dominated the discourse around the Game Developers Conference that year, and EA CEO Andrew Wilson was marshalling the publisher's resources to assure investors the company would keep up with this hot trend (or even the one after it).

"When I look at any of the VR devices, I look at that not in terms of 'What is that device going to deliver?' but a desire for gamers to have a different type of modality - the 'Get In' type of modality, right?" Wilson said in a panel at that month's SXSW Gaming conference. "That might be delivered to you through a headset, or through some hologram that evolves out of your living room floor."

Also at GDC, Sony announced it was getting into the market with the PSVR headset, unveiling its Project Morpheus VR headset at the Game Developers Conference and giving demos on the show floor. It wouldn't launch for two more years, but Sony was the biggest name to yet make a full-throated commitment to VR.

That designation didn't last long, as just a week later Facebook (now Meta) announced that it was acquiring Oculus for $2 billion.

The news was shocking, not least of all because Oculus' Palmer Luckey had told us in an interview published earlier that month that he had no interest in selling the company.

"We want to do things our way," Luckey said. "There are certainly people who are interested... but we have a vision for our consumer product and we know that we're going to be able to pull it off. We don't want to be assimilated into