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Palmer Luckey Leaves Facebook

213 points by petergatsby 10y ago

danso 10y ago
The TechCrunch write-up almost exclusively focuses on the "Nimble America" thing. I'm sure that didn't help his standing at Facebook, but he's been doing other things besides that failed Reddit campaign. Some more context in the Ars Technica writeup (I hadn't remembered how much he was on the hook for the Zenimax charges): https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/oculus-co-founder-palmer-luckey-leaves-facebook/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/oculus-co-founder-pal... > Luckey did appear briefly at a January trial in which id Software owner Zenimax Media accused Oculus of misappropriating trade secrets. While Oculus was cleared of the worst of those charges, the company was found liable for $300 million for various related charges. Luckey himself was personally found liable for $50 million in damages.
- moomin 10y ago
  Between those two and the fact that he is in possession of FU money, it feels pretty inevitable.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    I'm guessing the fact that Oculus is a distant third in VR market share (without even considering headsets such as Cardboard and Gear VR, which would put it even further behind) didn't help.
    - pmoriarty 10y ago
      Oculus is a company, not a product. The Gear VR is a product made by Oculus in collaboration with Samsung. You're probably thinking of the Oculus Rift, which is another product made by Oculus (or Facebook, if you prefer, now that they've bought Oculus, the company).
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- leereeves 10y ago
  What was Nimble America anyway, and why the outrage? The Daily Beast article isn't much help, talking about Pepe the Frog and "shitposting", with the banner picture, presumably the most egregious example they could publish, being Hillary's face with the caption "Too Big to Jail". Partisan, sure, but well within the realm of normal politics these days.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Some political campaigning group that intended to take online memes and run them as actual political billboards. The outrage was because it was pro-Trump.
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      There was also outrage within /r/The_Donald as well, because it sounded like a scam and people suspected one of the mods of trying to do a money grab.
    - justin66 10y ago
      > The outrage was because it was pro-Trump. Or because someone managed to find a way to make American political dialogue even dumber.
  - edaemon 10y ago
    As far as I understood it, it was a non-profit that Luckey funded to help promote Donald Trump's presidential campaign. It was seemingly going to do so through memes, though it never recognizably progressed beyond its initial promotion. It was derided from both sides; it was first posted for a sort of crowdfunding campaign to /r/The_Donald where it was lambasted as "astroturfing" and a corporate attempt to profit off of their community. The VR and tech community at large (which tends to lean left and anti-Trump) didn't think much of it until it was revealed that Luckey was providing the funding for it, at which point a great deal of his already waning community support dropped out from under him.
  - generic_user 10y ago
    The internet outrage professionals need there daily quota of clicks and its a slow news day.
devy 10y ago
> Facebook, which acquired the VR company almost exactly three years ago today. Perhaps Palmer is able to 100% cash out all his stocks/RSUs today so he's out to do something else?
- SteveNuts 10y ago
  He should set up a VR company
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Fairly sure FB would have made it worth his while to sign a non-compete.
    - kareemsabri 10y ago
      Pretty sure non-competes are illegal in California.
      - alrs 10y ago
        For employees. There are absolutely noncompetes in California for people who sell their businesses. http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/business-and-professions-code/bpc-sect-16601.html http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/business-and-professions-code/bp...
        trevyn 10y ago
        Question: If you're a rank and file employee who has exercised options, and are therefore a (very small) shareholder, does this apply to you?
        khuey 10y ago
        IANAL, but the plain text of the statute says: "For the purposes of this section, “owner of a business entity” means ... or any owner of capital stock, in the case of a business entity that is a corporation. For the purposes of this section, “ownership interest” means ... or a capital stockholder, in the case of a business entity that is a corporation." So it certainly seems possible. Note that you would have to "sell or otherwise dispos[e] of all of his or her ownership interest in the business entity" in order for this code to apply. So it sounds like it may be possible for a company to include a non-compete in an offer to buy back your shares. Again IANAL and this is not legal advice.
nsxwolf 10y ago
Is he really that "embattled"? Do people really have the energy to keep the outrage going this long?
- XorNot 10y ago
  He almost certainly shed a lot of his supporters with his actions.
  - nsxwolf 10y ago
    It's weird to me that he would attract supporters or detractors. He's not Steve Jobs. I got the Vive instead of the Rift because I like Vive's room scale tracking better than what Rift offers. I could care less about any of the names or personalities behind it.
    - baby 10y ago
      Oculus got kickstarted by a lot of backers.
    - nebabyte 10y ago
      Do you think it takes a Steve Jobs to drum up supporters or detractors? You clearly don't understand cults of personality. They're not limited to household names.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  Enthusiasts are _intense_, and the VR community is still all enthusiasts. At least partially because of the price, but probably also because of the severe lack of high-budget games. So yeah, the Reddit echo-chamber keeps the hate going long after it would normally die in that kind of community.
  - QuinnyPig 10y ago
    Add on the "gamer" subculture as well, and you've got a recipe for holding grudges for decades...
jdonaldson 10y ago
He makes me almost as nauseous as the headset.
- andybak 10y ago
  So you owned one? Tried it briefly? Do tell.
  - EthanHeilman 10y ago
    I owned a DK2 for a little while. Didn't make me feel sick even at low framerates (about 7FPS playing Elite:Dangerous on my very out of date gaming machine). After about 6 hours or so of continuous use I felt a little strange in a different way than 6 hours of computer time usually makes me feel.
  - wincy 10y ago
    Not the person you're responding to, but I own an Oculus Rift. I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, airplanes, trains are both awful, car rides are a "staring straight ahead no reading" affair unless I take drugs. Nausea totally depends on the game developer and mode of locomotion. Luckey's Tale, one of the launch games that came free with the Rift that has a camera floating sort of like Banjo-Kazooie surprisingly made me feel really ill. Cockpit games like EVE:Valkyrie were a problem, but then again I feel like if I were in a starship flying around I'd probably feel pretty sick too. However, things like The Climb where the camera is moving more erratically and the pace is faster I had no problem at all. Pretty much any game that uses the new Oculus Touch controls and relies on full body movement instead of a seated experience really helps as it puts me "into" my body a bit more so my brain doesn't get as confused.
    - sp332 10y ago
      Someone who studies VR interactions for a living recently posted this: Yoga for Building VR Tolerance http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/ http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/
  - scrollaway 10y ago
mmanfrin 10y ago
I don't find it takes much energy to consider him a horrible person. e: Downvoting because you disagree is not a proper use for your downvote button.
- schneems 10y ago
  Unrelated to this thread, I was just thinking to myself a few minutes ago "2015 me would be very surprised at how mad i've been able to bee for this long". So I would be more surprised if people weren't still outraged.
  - mmanfrin 10y ago
    I think there's a difference between being mad, and having formed an opinion about a person. I'm not actively raging about Lickey, but I have formed an impression of him that is unfavorable.
- dang 10y ago
  That's a bad HN comment to begin with because of the combo of unsubstantiveness and outrage. We're looking for thoughtful comments here. Adding the thing about downvotes breaks the HN guidelines in a different way (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so please don't do that either. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998806 and marked it off-topic.
schneems 10y ago
> failed Reddit campaign Failed all the way to the white-house.
- danso 10y ago
  r/The_Donald rejected "Nimble America" even before the mainstream media started to pile on Luckey: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/537tsg/this_community_is_not_for_salehere_are_lilz_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/537tsg/this_com... https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/543tdy/im_having_trouble_understanding_the_nimble/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/543tdy/im_havin... edit: changed "disowned" to "rejected", since the former implies that they were part of the campaign at some point.
  - chc 10y ago
    Based on those threads, it sounds like they were fine with what Luckey was actually doing but were concerned that he was trying to scam them. Both "rejected" and "disowned" sound a bit strong for basically saying, "This is cool if it is what it says it is, but I'm not sure enough to support it."
    - nebabyte 10y ago
      'were lukewarm to'? 'apathetic about'? Hmm
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998783 and marked it off-topic.
  - randyrand 10y ago
    How is this off-topic? I think its a pretty good point.
aanm1988 10y ago
ooof. that sucks. Kinda makes sense. Between the odd political stuff, the lawsuit where he was partially blamed, and the general poor PR at times.
deleted 10y ago
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djhworld 10y ago
Not sure how much he has in terms of liquid cash, but according to wikipedia his net worth is $730 million He'll be fine.
mozumder 10y ago
Probably indicates that VR really is deader than dead. The only people this appeals to are the tech-bros. I really don't understand the Silicon Valley tech-bros that think VR has any hope. How do they not see the obvious user-experience problems, like motion sickness and limited visibility & resolution, as well as its product liability issues, like always falling down along with running into walls and breaking things? If you think VR is a solution, then we know you're a bad product designer. The first generation of VR died out because of product-liability issues. Did those fundamental issues get solved? No.
- criley2 10y ago
  I don't understand people who use the demeaning and sexist term "tech bros" unironically. Did you know that there are women who like VR? Who code for VR? Who work to create it? Who are on the boards making decisions about its future? Does your "techbro" bigotry leave room for the women of tech? It makes me think you're a Gawker commenter who accidentally found their way to a community where you don't belong. I just don't get how this kind of condescending sexism finds its way here.
  - politician 10y ago
    It's worth pointing out that "Tech bro" is fairly derogatory toward men too.
  - anon_d 10y ago
    So, this person's male-specific slurs are sexist against women because it fails to insult them as well?
    - madamelic 10y ago
      Hey, we deserve to be insulted just as much as men are. Equality.
  - geofft 10y ago
    I think there are two distinct things you can disagree with in the parent comment. The first is whether the use of the phrase "tech bros" is defensible; the second is whether all the people who are supporting VR are those who can be called (rightly or wrongly) "tech bros". I think you're conflating those. I've always interpreted the term as being gendered, but not gender-essentialist; there are plenty of women who are "tech bros", because it's referring to a culture and set of ideals derived from gendered spaces like fraternities, but not those spaces themselves; plenty of "tech bros" were not members of a college fraternity, for instance. It is true that the vast majority of tech bros are men, for many reasons relating to society and gender. It's certainly possible that the term could get inaccurate, in which case I at least would favor a different one, but it works for now. Under that definition, "there exist women who do behavior X which you attribute to tech bros" does not imply "attributing behavior X to tech bros is incorrect". That leaves the question about whether "tech bros", such as they are, are the only people rooting for VR. I think that's fairly unlikely to be true, and yes, your points seem do rebut that claim. (That said, it's probably worth mentioning somewhere here that while women exist in VR, the industry seems to be biased towards an assumption of men, from various apps placing virtual objects at heights that are difficult for most biological women to reach, to the entire concept being based on a model of 3D visual processing that is more common in biological men: https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/ https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexi... Pointing out the obvious truth that VR seems to be male-dominated is not excluding women, and your question about bigotry seems to be attacking the messenger.) But even if it's misplaced to associate the entire VR industry with "tech bros", I don't think that invalidates the concept of "tech bros" itself. Finally, I think it's inappropriate to imply that a good-faith participant doesn't belong here.
dotnetisnotdead 10y ago
Lesson of the day: Keep out of politics if you're not on the "correct" side. If he walks away from VR we've all lost something.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  I'll live. Hell, I was never big into VR anyway, this could even be good for me.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Or, "if you're a public figure, or plan a public campaign supporting someone who is controversial, don't expect there to be zero criticism of your position because it's somehow sacred".
  - odessacubbage 10y ago
    it's sort of strange that a mainstream candidate with enough support to win the whole election is considered controversial, plenty public figures endorsed hilary and none received the level of backlash that palmer did. max temkin even funded a similarly cringey billboard campaign: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-23-report-oculus-rift-creator-palmer-luckey-secretly-funded-pro-trump-meme-website http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-23-report-oculus-r... http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-15-anti-trump-ad-alleges-candidate-mains-hanzo-in-overwatch http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-15-anti-trump-ad-a... unless we are to enforce a standard of public apoliticism for public figures across the board, uniquely singling out endorsements on one side regardless of wealth doesn't seem like a good way to generate effective discourse
    - andybak 10y ago
      It's too early to say but history might have a different view on this. I do think Trump is an anomaly. I certainly hope he isn't a trend.
    - DonHopkins 10y ago
      I don't remember seeing and hearing any video tapes of Hillary bragging about sexually assaulting anyone.
tannhauser23 10y ago
I wish him the best - he jump started this entire industry, which was for a long time in the realm of scifi. Go and read his IAMAs on Reddit: he's clearly passionate and knowledgeable about VR. I hope he finds a proper outlet for his talents, now that he has the resources to do whatever he wants.
devopsproject 10y ago
I almost feel bad for this Trumpkin https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/palmer-luckey-alt-right https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/palmer-luckey-alt...
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't violate the guidelines by calling names like this, and certainly not repetitively!
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    Trump and his ilk are masters at name calling and I will never stop returning the favor.
marricks 10y ago
I got big into VR partly because of him, enamored by an interview of him my girl friend pointed me to in 2013. He was young, enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me. Well, as the years wear on he, and oculus itself, has established more of itself from the hacker/open source vision. They’ve made enemies along the way, and many of the reasons people hate him/Oculus I disagree with. It’s an infant field, they need to fund games to even having reasonable games. Making games have become increasingly expensive. Sure there’s a place for indie devs, but those games don’t draw the mainstreamers VR needs to take off like I, and many others need. That being said, the things I’ve heard and seen from him make me think he does emobdy the gamergate “tech bro” (and I do use that as a pejorative) make my stomach churn. That I can’t really forgive, and don’t want to support. The privacy aspects of a Facebook (or google for that matter) owning VR, and getting access to what we physically look at for advertising, is such a gold mine. Totally terrifying. That’s one reason my next system will likely be something like the Vive, inspite of me finding Oculus far more polished and fun to have. EDIT: Interestingly enough I asked him specifically on an AMA if he planned on staying at Oculus, his answer was an emphatic yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_palmer_luckey_founder_of_oculus_and_designer/cytnax2/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_p...
- dsaw 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on why/how did you find Oculus more polished? Note : I have a Vive, which I bought after researching both (so I might be biased)
  - baby 10y ago
    Yup, for having tried both, the Vive is far superior to the Oculus.
  - marricks 10y ago
    I am certainly biased, despite having huge issues with Oculus. My experience is Vive demos and second hand. Setup was just placing cameras on a desk. I don't need external headphones. Store is curated, which is good and bad. I like trusting games won't give me nausea, or turn off people to VR. In my experience all it takes is one experience for some people to continue repeating "VR causes nausea" for literally 1+ year. My boss is this person, and it's hard to get him to try rift again. Touch, and seeing my fingers closely mirrored in VR, I find extremely polished and wonderful. Grabbing the first object in VR made me laugh in excitement, first time I did that since seeing Tuscany in CV1.
_throwaway3241 10y ago
Should he be considered another victim of the political-correctness-gone-wild liberal fascists of SV and their histeria, a victim of a bad product, or a victim of the silly Times' cover? Or all of the above?
exogeny 10y ago
I'm actually doubtful it has much to do with politics, if at all. Dude is a world-class weirdo and an extremely bad communicator. So was Zuck, but he took media training and got..decent at it. Palmer didn't and hasn't, and there you go.
- Mahn 10y ago
  > extremely bad communicator I don't know, some mistakes were made, but he was also pretty throughout in his Reddit AMAs. I think he does deserve some credit for that.
  - exogeny 10y ago
    Reddit is not real life. If you could gain the communication, leadership, and political skills necessary for an executive position at a company like Facebook by posting on Reddit, then their meeting rooms would smell a whole lot worse.
aphextron 10y ago
Anyone seeing this as having any connection to the VR industry as a whole is completely ignorant on the subject. Palmer has repeatedly shown himself to be a toxic liability to the brand, and this was inevitable to anyone who follows Oculus.
- istorical 10y ago
  a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack How insulting to Palmer, Mark Bolas, the Institute for Creative Technologies, and the wider virtual reality academic community.
- ArlenBales 10y ago
  > He's not an engineer or a programmer, and has had nothing to do with the design of the consumer product. He was just in the right place at the right time with a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack. You're belittling founders. Not all founders have to be programmers or designers.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  "He was just in the right place at the right time with a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack." eye roll Really? He's accomplished more than most of the folks on this site. I really really hate the "They weren't an engineer therefore they're just background noise" mentality. A startup is a team. Everyone from executives to the doc writers are important, often in very intangible ways.
  - sorenjan 10y ago
    What did Luckey contribute? The first seed of the idea? A proof of concept [0]? I haven't followed it very closely, but it seems to me that Carmack is the one that not only had the technical skills at the early stage and did a lot of evangelizing for the young technology even before he joined Oculus, his name was also a major factor in bringing in other talent and investment. I don't think Oculus would have been close to where they are today without Carmack, I've yet to read about any crucial contributions by Luckey. Right place at the right time does sound accurate. And of course companies need more than engineers, Steve jobs wasn't and engineer and his importance for Apple can hardly be overstated. [0] https://youtu.be/kw-DlWwlXHo?t=169 https://youtu.be/kw-DlWwlXHo?t=169
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cr0sh 10y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about this - ambivalent, I guess - pretty much how I felt after the FB acquisition. I was a KS supporter - but I had followed Luckey for a while before on the MTBS3D forums, when he was just playing around, modding classic HMDs - mixing up the parts. He was one of only a handful of people that I could see who still played around with VR in that mid-to-late 1990s way. At the time, I thought that if there were anybody who could bring back VR, it was him. I've played with DIY "homebrew" VR off and on since the mid-90s. I have a collection of old HMDs and other gear from the era. I've modded a powerglove, and at one time hooked it up to my Amiga and messed around with AMOS3D for fun with it. Later, Rend386...in short, I was disappointed to see VR die - so when the Kickstarter was announced, I was - to put it mildly - stoked. That KS was the first one I backed (and not the last!) - I had high hopes, especially because Luckey had made a huge deal out of there being Linux support. With the FB deal, that was dropped, and that's when for me at least, the gilding rubbed off revealing a more base interior to the whole thing. Still, I had hoped that it would all lead somewhere. In a way, I guess it did. More people than ever before got to play around with VR and such, and experience it all in ways that in the mid-90s I could only dream about (the tech just didn't exist at a price any normal person could afford). It was, though, a disappointment to hear that people were still having the same usage problems with this new tech that were the bane of VR back then. Now it seems that once again, interest is waning. The hardware is still way too expensive for most people to come on board. People are still skeptical about what it is, whether it really works, or worried about side effects and other problems. Others simply don't understand the concept of immersion - or if they do, they can't seem to grasp why that would be such a great thing (I find it odd that some can't understand the idea of being -inside- a virtual world - a world of make believe, a world of dreams? One would think that would be something everyone would be gung-ho about, but I guess not). Then to find out Palmer's true side, which - at least to me - wasn't apparent before; conservative, a seeming "I've got mine" attitude (and I don't begrudge his newfound wealth - in fact, I kinda proud for him on that mark), and bro-dude, let's support our favorite cheeto-in-chief... And then the whole Zenimax thing. For me, his reputation has been horribly tarnished. I'm glad he gave the whole VR thing another boost, but at the same time, it looks likely that this is the last great "hoorah" for the technology, and it will likely never get another chance again - at least not in the "gloves and goggles" classic form we've come to associate the term "VR" with. Perhaps that's for the best.
spondyl 10y ago
While not directly talking about Palmer, I'm not surprised that Oculus is having these sorts of troubles (co-founder leaving/lawsuit). Being the first-movers in the VR space, or in the current wave of actually viable VR products, it'd be surprised if they turn out to be the dominant force in the space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Resolution_of_technological_or_market_uncertainty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Resoluti...
timdeneau 10y ago
Curious how this will affect Oculus, if much at all. In the long run, I don’t think Oculus is good for the industry. Their room scale tracking hardware is inadequate, and their exclusive titles are dividing a fledgling market. I say this as a Vive owner and enthusiast. This along with the lawsuit… maybe it’s for the best.
- TwoBit 10y ago
  There wouldn't be any or many great VR titles if it wasn't for some initial investment. That is a chance for developers to actually make some money. Yeah Vive is still better in large rooms, but the Rift beats it on most other fronts, such as controllers, image quality, atw and asw, comfort, and of course apps.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  I haven't tried the Oculus Rift, but I do own the Note 4 Gear VR, and recently tried the Vive. I felt the Vive was clearly inferior, with a much closer and much more obvious and shallow feeling of depth to it, what felt like a worse field of view, and just more primitive VR games. I was severely disappointed, considering how great the reviews of Steam VR games were, how much I looked forward to finally trying them out, and how primitive and demo-like the Gear VR games and apps were. It felt like the Gear VR games set a relatively low bar that the Vive should easily exceed, but sadly the games for the Vive were even worse. If the Rift is actually better than the Gear VR, as I have expectation it is, then the Vive must be really awful in comparison. It is nice that the Vive tracks you as you walk around your room, but that doesn't make up for the poor game quality and other issues I mentioned. Overall, though, I think VR as a whole has a very, very long way to go. I was stunned and blown away when I first tried the Gear VR, but that sense of amazement wore off after a few weeks, and after that all the fun was in letting other people try it and vicariously enjoy their amazement. That lasted a few months, and ever since my Gear VR has been gathering dust, as it's just too much of a hassle to use, especially for long periods of time, when it gets too uncomfortable. The main problem, though, is that all the games and apps are way too primitive, and all feel like bare-bones demos. If any of them were great, all the hassle and discomfort would be worth it, but they're really not.. at least not after the novelty has worn off.
beatpanda 10y ago
It's very odd that in 2017 we're normalizing a political platform that promotes literal ethnic cleansing, executed at the highest levels of government, in broad daylight and in plain transparent language, as just another day in politics. This has been said ad nauseum and I will probably get downvotes for this, but opposition to Trump is not about mere disagreement. The triple threat of increasing mass deportation, increasing mass incarceration, and bribing local police departments to be complicit with both, constitutes a material, physical threat to people's lives, and to certain disfavored ethnic groups (black, Latino, Muslim) in particular. I would understand you if you were chiding people for being overwrought for saying, for example, that the Republican health care plan is going to kill people. Or that cutting back meals on wheels constitutes violence. Or whatever. But the rhetoric on crime and immigration is literally about spending money to send armed agents of the state into people's homes to maim, kidnap, and remove them from society. If you don't understand how this rises above the level of "just politics", I feel like it can only be because you don't consider the new targets of state violence to be fully human. And let's not forget that more than half of the country didn't want this president. Pretending this is just about the most liberal part of California complaining is incredibly specious.
- mst 10y ago
  > If you don't understand how this rises above the level of "just politics", I feel like it can only be because you don't consider the new targets of state violence to be fully human. While I'm extremely concerned about the crime and immigration stuff, "if you disagree with me then you must consider a large group of people subhuman" doesn't seem a constructive way to approach people who are insufficiently concerned as yet. > And let's not forget that more than half of the country didn't want this president. Unproven. I do rather hope it's true, but "a campaign focused on winning the electoral college lost the popular vote" is not quite the same thing.
  - TillE 10y ago
    > Unproven Um... http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-app...
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Peter Thiel next?
mtgx 10y ago
I give it 12 months before John Carmack leaves, too.
deleted 10y ago
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nichochar 10y ago
In my experience, innovators hate big companies. The culture and people there are all selfish, self involved, trying to "beat the game" by maximizing their RSUs, piggy backing on other people's work.
dayaz36 10y ago
Nothing in the entire article answered WHY he left. So it was because of the Trump thing?... Because that's stupid reason. Mark Zuckerberg who is the actual CEO of facebook is getting bad press on a daily basis and for much worse reasons than Palmer Luckey. Nobody outside of the tech community even knows who Palmer Luckey is but because he funded some trump trolls he gets ousted from the company he started??...something just doesn't sound right. Seems like a power play is happening behind the scenes and this is just an excuse
drawkbox 10y ago
In general, if you run a product or company it is a bad idea to get political. You instantly create 50% detractors when you need to always win about 60% support. Hold off politics activism until you have fuck you money. In most cases politics is a waste of time, change the world via the market and products and focus on your own success. Don't degrade your work by getting into politics, it is merely a divisive system today. Politics suck and they are past the point of grass roots influencing anything, only money works [1][2]. Palmer, like many other 20-somethings, got caught up in it. Political activism peaks around 27-30 ish, Usually by 30 you realize it is all bullshit and a waste of time other than voting and giving money to causes you believe in or that you think should win, quietly, on your own without sharing with the world your beliefs because others have differing beliefs. [1] https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
- elastic_church 10y ago
  Hm ... given Oculus' continued hegemony in the market place, and the high reward of supporting the United States' winning administration in the global marketplace, couldn't he just as easily not.... done anything? Like there are still devs on Oculus, Trump won, every one with clout that supported him is now in power, and I personally had no idea uhm yah he's probably got a lucrative VR contract signed up w/ DARPA, I think this is all show
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    > Oculus' continued hegemony in the market place I don't know what you're on about? Despite billions of money thrown at it by Zucks, the Vive outsells the Oculus 2:1, the PSVR outsells it by 3:1, the Gear VR outsells it by 18:1. [1]. There are still devs on Oculus (dozens of them!), but everybody sane develops on SteamVR from what I hear... Palmer is smart to take his cash and run while he can. [1] http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/6-3m-vr-headsets-were-shipped-in-2016/0178470 http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/6-3m-vr-headsets-were-shipped...
    - 10y ago
LeicaLatte 10y ago
Politics takes up a lot of time and I don't think creatives should get involved. Atleast not voluntarily.
yuhong 10y ago
Interestingly https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey shows no posts for almost a year.
staunch 10y ago
I completely support and forgive Palmer Luckey. I hope for the world's sake that he goes on to do more great things. There are truly bad people in the world. People who deserve to be hated. Palmer Luckey is very far from being one of them. If you're still piling on Palmer Luckey, you're a real piece of shit human being.

213 points by petergatsby 10y ago

danso 10y ago

The TechCrunch write-up almost exclusively focuses on the "Nimble America" thing. I'm sure that didn't help his standing at Facebook, but he's been doing other things besides that failed Reddit campaign. Some more context in the Ars Technica writeup (I hadn't remembered how much he was on the hook for the Zenimax charges): https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/oculus-co-founder-palmer-luckey-leaves-facebook/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/oculus-co-founder-pal... > Luckey did appear briefly at a January trial in which id Software owner Zenimax Media accused Oculus of misappropriating trade secrets. While Oculus was cleared of the worst of those charges, the company was found liable for $300 million for various related charges. Luckey himself was personally found liable for $50 million in damages.

moomin 10y ago
Between those two and the fact that he is in possession of FU money, it feels pretty inevitable.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I'm guessing the fact that Oculus is a distant third in VR market share (without even considering headsets such as Cardboard and Gear VR, which would put it even further behind) didn't help.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    Oculus is a company, not a product. The Gear VR is a product made by Oculus in collaboration with Samsung. You're probably thinking of the Oculus Rift, which is another product made by Oculus (or Facebook, if you prefer, now that they've bought Oculus, the company).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
leereeves 10y ago
What was Nimble America anyway, and why the outrage? The Daily Beast article isn't much help, talking about Pepe the Frog and "shitposting", with the banner picture, presumably the most egregious example they could publish, being Hillary's face with the caption "Too Big to Jail". Partisan, sure, but well within the realm of normal politics these days.
- makomk 10y ago
  Some political campaigning group that intended to take online memes and run them as actual political billboards. The outrage was because it was pro-Trump.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    There was also outrage within /r/The_Donald as well, because it sounded like a scam and people suspected one of the mods of trying to do a money grab.
  - justin66 10y ago
    > The outrage was because it was pro-Trump. Or because someone managed to find a way to make American political dialogue even dumber.
- edaemon 10y ago
  As far as I understood it, it was a non-profit that Luckey funded to help promote Donald Trump's presidential campaign. It was seemingly going to do so through memes, though it never recognizably progressed beyond its initial promotion. It was derided from both sides; it was first posted for a sort of crowdfunding campaign to /r/The_Donald where it was lambasted as "astroturfing" and a corporate attempt to profit off of their community. The VR and tech community at large (which tends to lean left and anti-Trump) didn't think much of it until it was revealed that Luckey was providing the funding for it, at which point a great deal of his already waning community support dropped out from under him.
- generic_user 10y ago
  The internet outrage professionals need there daily quota of clicks and its a slow news day.

devy 10y ago

> Facebook, which acquired the VR company almost exactly three years ago today. Perhaps Palmer is able to 100% cash out all his stocks/RSUs today so he's out to do something else?

SteveNuts 10y ago
He should set up a VR company
- r00fus 10y ago
  Fairly sure FB would have made it worth his while to sign a non-compete.
  - kareemsabri 10y ago
    Pretty sure non-competes are illegal in California.
    - alrs 10y ago
      For employees. There are absolutely noncompetes in California for people who sell their businesses. http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/business-and-professions-code/bpc-sect-16601.html http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/business-and-professions-code/bp...
      - trevyn 10y ago
        Question: If you're a rank and file employee who has exercised options, and are therefore a (very small) shareholder, does this apply to you?
        khuey 10y ago
        IANAL, but the plain text of the statute says: "For the purposes of this section, “owner of a business entity” means ... or any owner of capital stock, in the case of a business entity that is a corporation. For the purposes of this section, “ownership interest” means ... or a capital stockholder, in the case of a business entity that is a corporation." So it certainly seems possible. Note that you would have to "sell or otherwise dispos[e] of all of his or her ownership interest in the business entity" in order for this code to apply. So it sounds like it may be possible for a company to include a non-compete in an offer to buy back your shares. Again IANAL and this is not legal advice.

nsxwolf 10y ago

Is he really that "embattled"? Do people really have the energy to keep the outrage going this long?

XorNot 10y ago
He almost certainly shed a lot of his supporters with his actions.
- nsxwolf 10y ago
  It's weird to me that he would attract supporters or detractors. He's not Steve Jobs. I got the Vive instead of the Rift because I like Vive's room scale tracking better than what Rift offers. I could care less about any of the names or personalities behind it.
  - baby 10y ago
    Oculus got kickstarted by a lot of backers.
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    Do you think it takes a Steve Jobs to drum up supporters or detractors? You clearly don't understand cults of personality. They're not limited to household names.
wccrawford 10y ago
Enthusiasts are _intense_, and the VR community is still all enthusiasts. At least partially because of the price, but probably also because of the severe lack of high-budget games. So yeah, the Reddit echo-chamber keeps the hate going long after it would normally die in that kind of community.
- QuinnyPig 10y ago
  Add on the "gamer" subculture as well, and you've got a recipe for holding grudges for decades...

jdonaldson 10y ago

He makes me almost as nauseous as the headset.

andybak 10y ago
So you owned one? Tried it briefly? Do tell.
- EthanHeilman 10y ago
  I owned a DK2 for a little while. Didn't make me feel sick even at low framerates (about 7FPS playing Elite:Dangerous on my very out of date gaming machine). After about 6 hours or so of continuous use I felt a little strange in a different way than 6 hours of computer time usually makes me feel.
- wincy 10y ago
  Not the person you're responding to, but I own an Oculus Rift. I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, airplanes, trains are both awful, car rides are a "staring straight ahead no reading" affair unless I take drugs. Nausea totally depends on the game developer and mode of locomotion. Luckey's Tale, one of the launch games that came free with the Rift that has a camera floating sort of like Banjo-Kazooie surprisingly made me feel really ill. Cockpit games like EVE:Valkyrie were a problem, but then again I feel like if I were in a starship flying around I'd probably feel pretty sick too. However, things like The Climb where the camera is moving more erratically and the pace is faster I had no problem at all. Pretty much any game that uses the new Oculus Touch controls and relies on full body movement instead of a seated experience really helps as it puts me "into" my body a bit more so my brain doesn't get as confused.
  - sp332 10y ago
    Someone who studies VR interactions for a living recently posted this: Yoga for Building VR Tolerance http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/ http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/
- scrollaway 10y ago

mmanfrin 10y ago

I don't find it takes much energy to consider him a horrible person. e: Downvoting because you disagree is not a proper use for your downvote button.

schneems 10y ago
Unrelated to this thread, I was just thinking to myself a few minutes ago "2015 me would be very surprised at how mad i've been able to bee for this long". So I would be more surprised if people weren't still outraged.
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  I think there's a difference between being mad, and having formed an opinion about a person. I'm not actively raging about Lickey, but I have formed an impression of him that is unfavorable.
dang 10y ago
That's a bad HN comment to begin with because of the combo of unsubstantiveness and outrage. We're looking for thoughtful comments here. Adding the thing about downvotes breaks the HN guidelines in a different way (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so please don't do that either. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998806 and marked it off-topic.

schneems 10y ago

> failed Reddit campaign Failed all the way to the white-house.

danso 10y ago
r/The_Donald rejected "Nimble America" even before the mainstream media started to pile on Luckey: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/537tsg/this_community_is_not_for_salehere_are_lilz_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/537tsg/this_com... https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/543tdy/im_having_trouble_understanding_the_nimble/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/543tdy/im_havin... edit: changed "disowned" to "rejected", since the former implies that they were part of the campaign at some point.
- chc 10y ago
  Based on those threads, it sounds like they were fine with what Luckey was actually doing but were concerned that he was trying to scam them. Both "rejected" and "disowned" sound a bit strong for basically saying, "This is cool if it is what it says it is, but I'm not sure enough to support it."
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    'were lukewarm to'? 'apathetic about'? Hmm
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998783 and marked it off-topic.
- randyrand 10y ago
  How is this off-topic? I think its a pretty good point.

aanm1988 10y ago

ooof. that sucks. Kinda makes sense. Between the odd political stuff, the lawsuit where he was partially blamed, and the general poor PR at times.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

djhworld 10y ago

Not sure how much he has in terms of liquid cash, but according to wikipedia his net worth is $730 million He'll be fine.

mozumder 10y ago

Probably indicates that VR really is deader than dead. The only people this appeals to are the tech-bros. I really don't understand the Silicon Valley tech-bros that think VR has any hope. How do they not see the obvious user-experience problems, like motion sickness and limited visibility & resolution, as well as its product liability issues, like always falling down along with running into walls and breaking things? If you think VR is a solution, then we know you're a bad product designer. The first generation of VR died out because of product-liability issues. Did those fundamental issues get solved? No.

criley2 10y ago
I don't understand people who use the demeaning and sexist term "tech bros" unironically. Did you know that there are women who like VR? Who code for VR? Who work to create it? Who are on the boards making decisions about its future? Does your "techbro" bigotry leave room for the women of tech? It makes me think you're a Gawker commenter who accidentally found their way to a community where you don't belong. I just don't get how this kind of condescending sexism finds its way here.
- politician 10y ago
  It's worth pointing out that "Tech bro" is fairly derogatory toward men too.
- anon_d 10y ago
  So, this person's male-specific slurs are sexist against women because it fails to insult them as well?
  - madamelic 10y ago
    Hey, we deserve to be insulted just as much as men are. Equality.
- geofft 10y ago
  I think there are two distinct things you can disagree with in the parent comment. The first is whether the use of the phrase "tech bros" is defensible; the second is whether all the people who are supporting VR are those who can be called (rightly or wrongly) "tech bros". I think you're conflating those. I've always interpreted the term as being gendered, but not gender-essentialist; there are plenty of women who are "tech bros", because it's referring to a culture and set of ideals derived from gendered spaces like fraternities, but not those spaces themselves; plenty of "tech bros" were not members of a college fraternity, for instance. It is true that the vast majority of tech bros are men, for many reasons relating to society and gender. It's certainly possible that the term could get inaccurate, in which case I at least would favor a different one, but it works for now. Under that definition, "there exist women who do behavior X which you attribute to tech bros" does not imply "attributing behavior X to tech bros is incorrect". That leaves the question about whether "tech bros", such as they are, are the only people rooting for VR. I think that's fairly unlikely to be true, and yes, your points seem do rebut that claim. (That said, it's probably worth mentioning somewhere here that while women exist in VR, the industry seems to be biased towards an assumption of men, from various apps placing virtual objects at heights that are difficult for most biological women to reach, to the entire concept being based on a model of 3D visual processing that is more common in biological men: https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/ https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexi... Pointing out the obvious truth that VR seems to be male-dominated is not excluding women, and your question about bigotry seems to be attacking the messenger.) But even if it's misplaced to associate the entire VR industry with "tech bros", I don't think that invalidates the concept of "tech bros" itself. Finally, I think it's inappropriate to imply that a good-faith participant doesn't belong here.

dotnetisnotdead 10y ago

Lesson of the day: Keep out of politics if you're not on the "correct" side. If he walks away from VR we've all lost something.

nebabyte 10y ago
I'll live. Hell, I was never big into VR anyway, this could even be good for me.
FireBeyond 10y ago
Or, "if you're a public figure, or plan a public campaign supporting someone who is controversial, don't expect there to be zero criticism of your position because it's somehow sacred".
- odessacubbage 10y ago
  it's sort of strange that a mainstream candidate with enough support to win the whole election is considered controversial, plenty public figures endorsed hilary and none received the level of backlash that palmer did. max temkin even funded a similarly cringey billboard campaign: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-23-report-oculus-rift-creator-palmer-luckey-secretly-funded-pro-trump-meme-website http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-23-report-oculus-r... http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-15-anti-trump-ad-alleges-candidate-mains-hanzo-in-overwatch http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-15-anti-trump-ad-a... unless we are to enforce a standard of public apoliticism for public figures across the board, uniquely singling out endorsements on one side regardless of wealth doesn't seem like a good way to generate effective discourse
  - andybak 10y ago
    It's too early to say but history might have a different view on this. I do think Trump is an anomaly. I certainly hope he isn't a trend.
  - DonHopkins 10y ago
    I don't remember seeing and hearing any video tapes of Hillary bragging about sexually assaulting anyone.

tannhauser23 10y ago

I wish him the best - he jump started this entire industry, which was for a long time in the realm of scifi. Go and read his IAMAs on Reddit: he's clearly passionate and knowledgeable about VR. I hope he finds a proper outlet for his talents, now that he has the resources to do whatever he wants.

devopsproject 10y ago

I almost feel bad for this Trumpkin https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/palmer-luckey-alt-right https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/palmer-luckey-alt...

sctb 10y ago
Please don't violate the guidelines by calling names like this, and certainly not repetitively!
- devopsproject 10y ago
  Trump and his ilk are masters at name calling and I will never stop returning the favor.

marricks 10y ago

I got big into VR partly because of him, enamored by an interview of him my girl friend pointed me to in 2013. He was young, enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me. Well, as the years wear on he, and oculus itself, has established more of itself from the hacker/open source vision. They’ve made enemies along the way, and many of the reasons people hate him/Oculus I disagree with. It’s an infant field, they need to fund games to even having reasonable games. Making games have become increasingly expensive. Sure there’s a place for indie devs, but those games don’t draw the mainstreamers VR needs to take off like I, and many others need. That being said, the things I’ve heard and seen from him make me think he does emobdy the gamergate “tech bro” (and I do use that as a pejorative) make my stomach churn. That I can’t really forgive, and don’t want to support. The privacy aspects of a Facebook (or google for that matter) owning VR, and getting access to what we physically look at for advertising, is such a gold mine. Totally terrifying. That’s one reason my next system will likely be something like the Vive, inspite of me finding Oculus far more polished and fun to have. EDIT: Interestingly enough I asked him specifically on an AMA if he planned on staying at Oculus, his answer was an emphatic yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_palmer_luckey_founder_of_oculus_and_designer/cytnax2/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_p...

dsaw 10y ago
Can you elaborate on why/how did you find Oculus more polished? Note : I have a Vive, which I bought after researching both (so I might be biased)
- baby 10y ago
  Yup, for having tried both, the Vive is far superior to the Oculus.
- marricks 10y ago
  I am certainly biased, despite having huge issues with Oculus. My experience is Vive demos and second hand. Setup was just placing cameras on a desk. I don't need external headphones. Store is curated, which is good and bad. I like trusting games won't give me nausea, or turn off people to VR. In my experience all it takes is one experience for some people to continue repeating "VR causes nausea" for literally 1+ year. My boss is this person, and it's hard to get him to try rift again. Touch, and seeing my fingers closely mirrored in VR, I find extremely polished and wonderful. Grabbing the first object in VR made me laugh in excitement, first time I did that since seeing Tuscany in CV1.

_throwaway3241 10y ago

Should he be considered another victim of the political-correctness-gone-wild liberal fascists of SV and their histeria, a victim of a bad product, or a victim of the silly Times' cover? Or all of the above?

exogeny 10y ago

I'm actually doubtful it has much to do with politics, if at all. Dude is a world-class weirdo and an extremely bad communicator. So was Zuck, but he took media training and got..decent at it. Palmer didn't and hasn't, and there you go.

Mahn 10y ago
> extremely bad communicator I don't know, some mistakes were made, but he was also pretty throughout in his Reddit AMAs. I think he does deserve some credit for that.
- exogeny 10y ago
  Reddit is not real life. If you could gain the communication, leadership, and political skills necessary for an executive position at a company like Facebook by posting on Reddit, then their meeting rooms would smell a whole lot worse.

aphextron 10y ago

Anyone seeing this as having any connection to the VR industry as a whole is completely ignorant on the subject. Palmer has repeatedly shown himself to be a toxic liability to the brand, and this was inevitable to anyone who follows Oculus.

istorical 10y ago
a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack How insulting to Palmer, Mark Bolas, the Institute for Creative Technologies, and the wider virtual reality academic community.
ArlenBales 10y ago
> He's not an engineer or a programmer, and has had nothing to do with the design of the consumer product. He was just in the right place at the right time with a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack. You're belittling founders. Not all founders have to be programmers or designers.
meddlepal 10y ago
"He was just in the right place at the right time with a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack." eye roll Really? He's accomplished more than most of the folks on this site. I really really hate the "They weren't an engineer therefore they're just background noise" mentality. A startup is a team. Everyone from executives to the doc writers are important, often in very intangible ways.
- sorenjan 10y ago
  What did Luckey contribute? The first seed of the idea? A proof of concept [0]? I haven't followed it very closely, but it seems to me that Carmack is the one that not only had the technical skills at the early stage and did a lot of evangelizing for the young technology even before he joined Oculus, his name was also a major factor in bringing in other talent and investment. I don't think Oculus would have been close to where they are today without Carmack, I've yet to read about any crucial contributions by Luckey. Right place at the right time does sound accurate. And of course companies need more than engineers, Steve jobs wasn't and engineer and his importance for Apple can hardly be overstated. [0] https://youtu.be/kw-DlWwlXHo?t=169 https://youtu.be/kw-DlWwlXHo?t=169

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cr0sh 10y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about this - ambivalent, I guess - pretty much how I felt after the FB acquisition. I was a KS supporter - but I had followed Luckey for a while before on the MTBS3D forums, when he was just playing around, modding classic HMDs - mixing up the parts. He was one of only a handful of people that I could see who still played around with VR in that mid-to-late 1990s way. At the time, I thought that if there were anybody who could bring back VR, it was him. I've played with DIY "homebrew" VR off and on since the mid-90s. I have a collection of old HMDs and other gear from the era. I've modded a powerglove, and at one time hooked it up to my Amiga and messed around with AMOS3D for fun with it. Later, Rend386...in short, I was disappointed to see VR die - so when the Kickstarter was announced, I was - to put it mildly - stoked. That KS was the first one I backed (and not the last!) - I had high hopes, especially because Luckey had made a huge deal out of there being Linux support. With the FB deal, that was dropped, and that's when for me at least, the gilding rubbed off revealing a more base interior to the whole thing. Still, I had hoped that it would all lead somewhere. In a way, I guess it did. More people than ever before got to play around with VR and such, and experience it all in ways that in the mid-90s I could only dream about (the tech just didn't exist at a price any normal person could afford). It was, though, a disappointment to hear that people were still having the same usage problems with this new tech that were the bane of VR back then. Now it seems that once again, interest is waning. The hardware is still way too expensive for most people to come on board. People are still skeptical about what it is, whether it really works, or worried about side effects and other problems. Others simply don't understand the concept of immersion - or if they do, they can't seem to grasp why that would be such a great thing (I find it odd that some can't understand the idea of being -inside- a virtual world - a world of make believe, a world of dreams? One would think that would be something everyone would be gung-ho about, but I guess not). Then to find out Palmer's true side, which - at least to me - wasn't apparent before; conservative, a seeming "I've got mine" attitude (and I don't begrudge his newfound wealth - in fact, I kinda proud for him on that mark), and bro-dude, let's support our favorite cheeto-in-chief... And then the whole Zenimax thing. For me, his reputation has been horribly tarnished. I'm glad he gave the whole VR thing another boost, but at the same time, it looks likely that this is the last great "hoorah" for the technology, and it will likely never get another chance again - at least not in the "gloves and goggles" classic form we've come to associate the term "VR" with. Perhaps that's for the best.

spondyl 10y ago

While not directly talking about Palmer, I'm not surprised that Oculus is having these sorts of troubles (co-founder leaving/lawsuit). Being the first-movers in the VR space, or in the current wave of actually viable VR products, it'd be surprised if they turn out to be the dominant force in the space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Resolution_of_technological_or_market_uncertainty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Resoluti...

timdeneau 10y ago

Curious how this will affect Oculus, if much at all. In the long run, I don’t think Oculus is good for the industry. Their room scale tracking hardware is inadequate, and their exclusive titles are dividing a fledgling market. I say this as a Vive owner and enthusiast. This along with the lawsuit… maybe it’s for the best.

TwoBit 10y ago
There wouldn't be any or many great VR titles if it wasn't for some initial investment. That is a chance for developers to actually make some money. Yeah Vive is still better in large rooms, but the Rift beats it on most other fronts, such as controllers, image quality, atw and asw, comfort, and of course apps.
pmoriarty 10y ago
I haven't tried the Oculus Rift, but I do own the Note 4 Gear VR, and recently tried the Vive. I felt the Vive was clearly inferior, with a much closer and much more obvious and shallow feeling of depth to it, what felt like a worse field of view, and just more primitive VR games. I was severely disappointed, considering how great the reviews of Steam VR games were, how much I looked forward to finally trying them out, and how primitive and demo-like the Gear VR games and apps were. It felt like the Gear VR games set a relatively low bar that the Vive should easily exceed, but sadly the games for the Vive were even worse. If the Rift is actually better than the Gear VR, as I have expectation it is, then the Vive must be really awful in comparison. It is nice that the Vive tracks you as you walk around your room, but that doesn't make up for the poor game quality and other issues I mentioned. Overall, though, I think VR as a whole has a very, very long way to go. I was stunned and blown away when I first tried the Gear VR, but that sense of amazement wore off after a few weeks, and after that all the fun was in letting other people try it and vicariously enjoy their amazement. That lasted a few months, and ever since my Gear VR has been gathering dust, as it's just too much of a hassle to use, especially for long periods of time, when it gets too uncomfortable. The main problem, though, is that all the games and apps are way too primitive, and all feel like bare-bones demos. If any of them were great, all the hassle and discomfort would be worth it, but they're really not.. at least not after the novelty has worn off.

beatpanda 10y ago

It's very odd that in 2017 we're normalizing a political platform that promotes literal ethnic cleansing, executed at the highest levels of government, in broad daylight and in plain transparent language, as just another day in politics. This has been said ad nauseum and I will probably get downvotes for this, but opposition to Trump is not about mere disagreement. The triple threat of increasing mass deportation, increasing mass incarceration, and bribing local police departments to be complicit with both, constitutes a material, physical threat to people's lives, and to certain disfavored ethnic groups (black, Latino, Muslim) in particular. I would understand you if you were chiding people for being overwrought for saying, for example, that the Republican health care plan is going to kill people. Or that cutting back meals on wheels constitutes violence. Or whatever. But the rhetoric on crime and immigration is literally about spending money to send armed agents of the state into people's homes to maim, kidnap, and remove them from society. If you don't understand how this rises above the level of "just politics", I feel like it can only be because you don't consider the new targets of state violence to be fully human. And let's not forget that more than half of the country didn't want this president. Pretending this is just about the most liberal part of California complaining is incredibly specious.

mst 10y ago
> If you don't understand how this rises above the level of "just politics", I feel like it can only be because you don't consider the new targets of state violence to be fully human. While I'm extremely concerned about the crime and immigration stuff, "if you disagree with me then you must consider a large group of people subhuman" doesn't seem a constructive way to approach people who are insufficiently concerned as yet. > And let's not forget that more than half of the country didn't want this president. Unproven. I do rather hope it's true, but "a campaign focused on winning the electoral college lost the popular vote" is not quite the same thing.
- TillE 10y ago
  > Unproven Um... http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-app...

Mao_Zedang 10y ago

Peter Thiel next?

mtgx 10y ago

I give it 12 months before John Carmack leaves, too.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nichochar 10y ago

In my experience, innovators hate big companies. The culture and people there are all selfish, self involved, trying to "beat the game" by maximizing their RSUs, piggy backing on other people's work.

dayaz36 10y ago

Nothing in the entire article answered WHY he left. So it was because of the Trump thing?... Because that's stupid reason. Mark Zuckerberg who is the actual CEO of facebook is getting bad press on a daily basis and for much worse reasons than Palmer Luckey. Nobody outside of the tech community even knows who Palmer Luckey is but because he funded some trump trolls he gets ousted from the company he started??...something just doesn't sound right. Seems like a power play is happening behind the scenes and this is just an excuse

drawkbox 10y ago

In general, if you run a product or company it is a bad idea to get political. You instantly create 50% detractors when you need to always win about 60% support. Hold off politics activism until you have fuck you money. In most cases politics is a waste of time, change the world via the market and products and focus on your own success. Don't degrade your work by getting into politics, it is merely a divisive system today. Politics suck and they are past the point of grass roots influencing anything, only money works [1][2]. Palmer, like many other 20-somethings, got caught up in it. Political activism peaks around 27-30 ish, Usually by 30 you realize it is all bullshit and a waste of time other than voting and giving money to causes you believe in or that you think should win, quietly, on your own without sharing with the world your beliefs because others have differing beliefs. [1] https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

elastic_church 10y ago
Hm ... given Oculus' continued hegemony in the market place, and the high reward of supporting the United States' winning administration in the global marketplace, couldn't he just as easily not.... done anything? Like there are still devs on Oculus, Trump won, every one with clout that supported him is now in power, and I personally had no idea uhm yah he's probably got a lucrative VR contract signed up w/ DARPA, I think this is all show
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  > Oculus' continued hegemony in the market place I don't know what you're on about? Despite billions of money thrown at it by Zucks, the Vive outsells the Oculus 2:1, the PSVR outsells it by 3:1, the Gear VR outsells it by 18:1. [1]. There are still devs on Oculus (dozens of them!), but everybody sane develops on SteamVR from what I hear... Palmer is smart to take his cash and run while he can. [1] http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/6-3m-vr-headsets-were-shipped-in-2016/0178470 http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/6-3m-vr-headsets-were-shipped...
  - 10y ago

LeicaLatte 10y ago

Politics takes up a lot of time and I don't think creatives should get involved. Atleast not voluntarily.

yuhong 10y ago

Interestingly https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey shows no posts for almost a year.

staunch 10y ago

I completely support and forgive Palmer Luckey. I hope for the world's sake that he goes on to do more great things. There are truly bad people in the world. People who deserve to be hated. Palmer Luckey is very far from being one of them. If you're still piling on Palmer Luckey, you're a real piece of shit human being.