It seems there will be no building crazy creations in a Minecraft virtual reality any time soon. Following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson announced he is cancelling any plans to bring Minecraft to the Oculus Rift. In a tweet he posted: “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled the deal. Facebook creeps me out.” While we wont see an official version of Minecraft, a beta version of the game for Rift is available on the Oculus website, though it was retitled Minecrift.
In a blog post, Persson stated:
“Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.”
He continues:
“Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social…But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.”
Facebook announced their purchase of Oculus this morning in a (take a guess) Facebook post. While they stated that they want Oculus to put gaming first, Facebook obviously wants to push virtual reality beyond gaming. They seem to want to take Skype’s place and innovate how we communicate with each other through virtual space. Perhaps it will become a new way for us to interact with each other and a way to video chat with each other. How Sony adapts their Project Morpheus VR in response to the new uses of the Oculus Rift remains to be seen.
