Facebook Just Cannot Win with Oculus Purchase, Lawsuit
posted Sunday Jan 29, 2017 by Scott Ertz
Since Facebook's $2 billion purchase of Oculus in 2014, the move has been questioned. What was Facebook's interest in getting into the VR market? Did they do their due diligence in researching the company? Would they be able to make anything out of Oculus or would they blunder the company's hype and lead?
The last question has been answered by Microsoft, HTC, Samsung, Sony and others, who have come into the space and successfully beaten the excitement out of Oculus, with the HTC Vive being the generally agreed upon leader. The due diligence question seems to have been answered, as well, with the lawsuit between Oculus and ZeniMax making its way to a jury, and a lot of information making its way to the world.
ZeniMax built VR technology, Rage VR, which never quite took off. While Oculus was getting off the ground, and before the purchase by Facebook, Oculus engineers engaged John Carmack, the founder of id Software, creators of Doom, and involved with the Rage VR test bed and the Doom BFG Edition demo for the platform. The problem is that the information Carmack shared was covered by NDA and could not be shared with Oculus engineers without compensation. This is ZeniMax's version of the story.
Oculus tells a different version, however. In fact, they claim that co-founder Palmer Luckey was responsible for the technology powering Rift. ZeniMax insists, however, that Luckey is a "hobbyist" and could not have been responsible for the complex work taking place within the engineering division. Oculus says that the technology that was used that is similar to Rage was publicly available, to which the question of why only Oculus had is was raised.
The jury is in deliberations, likely to last into the next week. ZeniMax is asking for $2 billion in damages and another $2 billion in compensation for the information. This could be a big problem for Facebook and investors, as well as anyone who is invested in the Oculus ecosystem, which could suddenly have a very large bill to pay.
