Notch refused to release Minecraft for Oculus Rift

In the illustration: Minecrift for Oculus Rift

Virtual reality should change the world ... but not through Facebook! Minecraft author Markus [Notch] Persson published a post on his blog, where he speaks very warmly about Oculus VR and the virtual reality helmet, which he also bought through Kickstarter. For him, the news of Oculus’s ownership of Facebook was a big disappointment.

Dislike of the social network was so great that Notch today canceled the deal to release Minecraft for Oculus Rift. “Facebook gives me disgust. Their motives are too muddy and impermanent, ”he explains the reasons for such an act.

Markus Persson said that he visited the Oculus office two weeks ago - and what he saw exceeded all expectations. Over the past couple of years, the engineering team has managed to overcome almost all of the major difficulties, with only implementation and software problems remaining. The development clearly goes to the finish line. He feels that in 10 years we will remember these problems (what if the VR helmet player moves forward too far and can hit the wall?), As we remember the problems of implementing GUI in graphical games on the PC.
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“Of course they wanted Minecraft,” wrote Notch. - I said that the game is not very suitable for this platform, because there you need to move too much, it works in Java (it’s difficult to provide 90 fps, especially if the player created a huge world), it relies heavily on the GUI. Although you can try to make a small Minecraft prototype for Oculus with limited capabilities. Something free, like Minecraft PI Edition . A preliminary agreement was reached - and the developers from both sides began negotiations.

“And then, in less than two weeks, Facebook bought them. Facebook is not a company created from scratch by technical enthusiasts. This is not a game developer. The history of Facebook is the history of the growth of the user base, and nothing but the user base. People have created games for Facebook before, and although at first everything worked fine, they ended up in an uncomfortable situation when Facebook made changes to the platform. ”

Notch explains that he does not want to deal with social functionality, he is only interested in working on games. “I definitely want to be part of the development of VR technology, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too muddy and inconstant, and they have no historically stable platform. There is nothing in their history that allows them to trust, and therefore they cause disgust in me [ creepy - in the original ]. ”

Notch stressed that he is not going to invest in increasing the capitalization of Facebook acquisitions.

PS John Carmack tweeted that he was writing code just like last week, and he hopes that the deal with Facebook will help to avoid a “scalability crisis” for virtual reality technologies. Probably, John means that instead of a high-quality niche product there is a risk of getting a low-quality crafts for the mass market.