Oculus Wants to Use Facebook to Build a Billion-Player MMO

McKitten

New member
Apr 20, 2013
74
0
0
TL;DR version:
CEO of company producing Occulus Rift would really like to sell a Billion of them.
More news at nine.
 

Fasckira

Dice Tart
Oct 22, 2009
1,678
0
0
BrotherRool said:
This is where I'm most excited for VR. The games are going to be awesome, but the way you interacting with people online in a way that feels like they're in the room with you?

I want the future where I can visit the moon with friends after a stressful day
Im with you on this. Even if the games are lacking in quality, I'd be happy with the ability to meet up in themed VR areas. Can you imagine playing a game of Pathfinder over the web in VR? Even if you're still doing dice rolls, you could have rooms that fit the theme.. its all exciting stuff to me.
 
Mar 30, 2010
3,785
0
0
Alterego-X said:
Grouchy Imp said:
I'll be honest, the image of an office full of people sat behind their desks with screens stuck to their faces in an unnerving one.
Cultural standards change. Once upon a time, the visual of people talking to themselves while walking down the street would have been outlandishly alien, and not a little bit unnerving.

Even the Television was predicted to fail when it was the conventional wisdom that "People must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn?t time for it? and "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night?.
Cultural standards can change, but not every invention brings about change. The Rift is not the first VR headset that has tried to make it into the mainstream. Or the second, or third, or fourth - and that kinda shows that the general public just doesn't buy into VR in the same way that gamers do.

josemlopes said:
Grouchy Imp said:
It can work and provide some interesting stuff, it will never replace the actual experiences but since now everyone has a lot of online friends its a nice way to do stuff that isnt exactly just playing games.

I can see a mix of this

And this working well
Oh, VR will always have the potential to be a really cool niche toy, I just don't see one billion people buying into it.
 

Alterego-X

New member
Nov 22, 2009
611
0
0
Grouchy Imp said:
Cultural standards can change, but not every invention brings about change. The Rift is not the first VR headset that has tried to make it into the mainstream. Or the second, or third, or fourth - and that kinda shows that the general public just doesn't buy into VR in the same way that gamers do.
The Wright brothers weren't the first ones to build an aircraft. Their early predecessors' failures didn't reflect on a lack of of public interest in the concept of flying, only a lack of ability to fulfill their promise in terms of engineering.

You could tell that people wanted to fly, through the plethora of dreams and fiction about flying, and for that matter, from the plethora of inventors who kept working on it even after so many failures.

Apple wasn't the first one to make a tablet, not by decades. Their early predecessors were heavy, with unresponsive touchscreens, low computing power, and no net to connect to. Their failures didn't reflect on a lack of of public interest in the concept of tablets, only a lack of ability to fulfill their promise in terms of engineering.

Mobile phones and television both had prototypes decades before they caught on.

VR seems to be one of those things. There is just something fundamentally, self-evidently superior about the idea of total presence inside virtual worlds, which explains why people keep waiting for it, keep making them, and keep glorifying it in fiction.

Maybe the Rift won't be that break even point. Who knows, maybe we are still one generation before that. But we are getting there, and that "we" includes a rather lagre segment of the public.
 

Zontar

Mad Max 2019
Feb 18, 2013
4,931
0
0
That 2 billion Facebook wasted on a company not worth 1/20th of what they paid for is causing delusions of grandeur.
 

MeChaNiZ3D

New member
Aug 30, 2011
3,104
0
0
I don't know about you, but I'd rather be the Gameboy than the iPhone. Beloved instead of used cynically, knows what it does, and for all the advances of technology, has tighter controls.

As for the actual news, MMO means nothing and Facebook in all its forms outside of itself can take a hike, so in a word, unenthusiastic.
 

Evil Smurf

Admin of Catoholics Anonymous
Nov 11, 2011
11,597
0
0
If I wanted to have a realistic experience with my "friends" I'd go outside. However, I can see VR porn being huge.
 

Rabid_meese

New member
Jan 7, 2014
47
0
0
Alterego-X said:
It seems to me there is a difference between wanting to turn Facebook, into a VR game, and wanting to turn Farmville into a VR game.

Everything that you named is done by people who are distinct from facebook itself and aren't interested in increasing the whole thing's overall public penetration, or access to actual socialization, but leeching from the userbase.
Oh, I'm aware of that. That's just a dig at the current market of Facebook games. Considering Facebook has made quite a decent cut of cash from people using this method (about 30% from what I've read). Given the costs I brought up, its not too farfetched to assume that a microtransaction model would be in place. Unless they plaster it with ad's. Or require a monthly fee.

Alterego-X said:
I'm pretty sure that it's not something that they would just release in early 2015, and have a billion users by 2016, more like the prototype of an abstract longer term plan. They haven't even said that they ARE MAKING such a thing, just that they "want to make" one.

For one thing, the first consumer version will still be insufficient for that kind of thing. Without body tracking and facial expression tracking, VR avatars would feel like every other MMO game avatar, stiff puppets with stiff faces standing around while the *real* players are chatting around. It would need to have something like SOEmote but better and applied to more of the body. Otherwise, visiting your doctor in VR would pretty much just consist of online chatting with your doctor while looking at some 3D model he made.
I don't doubt that this won't be out anytime soon. As I said in my post, I can't predict the future, so I could very well be wrong. But the technology for a 1 billion player MMO just doesn't exist is a costly manner. Could we have that technology down the line? Yeah, probably. There are still certain logistical issues that need to be addressed - like the mentioned peddling of 1 billion units. Even over a long term broadcast, selling a billion of something is a pretty huge accomplishment (outside of a daily necessity, like food).

Talking about it and reveling the grand plan for it just isn't logical right now. It would be like a car company saying in a public outing that "Yeah, we're totally committed to making consumer model cars that everyone will own that runs off of an infinite power source." It sounds grand - amazing even. But it doesn't mean anything if they're just blowing smoke up our asses.

Alterego-X said:
Well, people ARE already asking for medical advice, and having friends, on the internet. It just hasn't disrupted close personal interactions, but added long distance communications to it.

It is those long distance communications that could be disrupted again, if they would be brought up to a level more comparable to personal meetups, if instead of texts and emoticons, and blind voices, and video chats (that are awkwardly failing to even make eye contact), people from all over the world could actually sit down in the same bar, or have walks together in picturesque gardens, or just have each other appear in their room through AR. (which could be a followup to VR with another camera on the front).
Medical advice online is kind of a thing. The dream mentioned of visiting your doctors over the Rift in the Facebook press release from the Facebook buyout is not something that could realistically be done. Most doctoral issues require personal contact. No matter how good the Oculus becomes, I doubt it'll ever get the kit a doctor needs to examine your vitals over the internet. Even something as simple for checking for the flu would require them to check your throat - even with a webcam, you'd be hardpressed to find an angle where the doctor could check it out. Ditto for the ears, and nostrils. There are several functions in doctoring it would be good at, I don't doubt that. But realistically, I feel safe putting my money in the camp of "it'll never happen."

As for the online friend bit - I'm fully aware. I have two good friends who I've met and primarily interacted with over the internet. I'm also kind of tech savvy. Most people I know wouldn't consider that a norm. And even if they did - there are still a lot of social interactions that require a level of personal contact. There is a huge difference between sitting at your desk, getting smashed off drinks with your friends while you all hang out in a VR world and going to a bar. Same with a movie. Or a restaurant. Not only would culture have to change drastically for these things to work, but the experiences of hanging out with your friends in an online space already exists today.

I just don't see the plausibility of a game with 1 billion users. The market has gotten less homogenized as a whole, not more.
 

Mezahmay

New member
Dec 11, 2013
517
0
0
Does Facebook even have one billion active users at this point? More importantly, does Brendan Iribe think a Facebook MMO is going to be a significant draw? I'm having a difficult time deciding who is more delusional: Mark Zuckerberg for investing $2 billion in what is currently a prototype to save his increasingly irrelevant social networking website or this guy for thinking a relatively expensive VR headset is going to appeal to core gamers and/or social gamers in significant enough numbers to get to a few hundred thousand let alone one billion active players on said increasingly irrelevant social networking website.
 

Atmos Duality

New member
Mar 3, 2010
8,473
0
0
Zuckerberg is just dreaming big here; too big. Which suggests to me that it's just a PR piece meant to advertise to potential investors. "We have the best VR device in development, this is how we're going to use it."

I seriously doubt there's even a game concept so dumbed down as to appeal to a billion people; let alone an MMO.
(good luck prying the huge Asian MMO market away for your shitty MMO Zuckerberg; they're about 15 years ahead of you in terms of life destroying social stressors.)
 

SadisticFire

New member
Oct 1, 2012
338
0
0
Didn't Second Life get on this boat awhile ago? The people who want something like this already have something or will have something. They probably aren't going to be wanting to use the system that Facebook would develop, they don't exactly have good will of the people.
 

blazearmoru

New member
Sep 26, 2010
233
0
0
Can't they just make a cross dimensional mmo? Like gates or someshit that lets a player's char traverse different games while still being on the same system as they're not not separated?
 

TheMadDoctorsCat

New member
Apr 2, 2008
1,163
0
0
Lord alive, you guys are cynical today. Let's not take a gigantic dump on the whole thing before we even know how it'll look or what its themes are, ok? Why assume this would be the new "Second Life" instead of the new, say, "World of Warcraft"?

Say what you like about Facebook, they know what to do to keep people interested in their stuff.
 

TerribleAssassin

New member
Apr 11, 2010
2,053
0
0
Remember kids, if the CEO of the company announces that it wants to use it's owners infrastructure, it's probably the parent company trying to ruin our special thing because we have all the ownership of the company because we bought a prototype.

But in all seriousness, 1 billion people is a stretch, that'd require disgusting amounts of server space that quite frankly no company would invest in.
 

Amir Kondori

New member
Apr 11, 2013
932
0
0
Good for them. While it doesn't sound appealing to me I am glad they are attempting to push boundaries in virtual communications and gaming.
 

RandV80

New member
Oct 1, 2009
1,507
0
0
Well they're really going to have to do their research. WoW is the most successful MMO ever, everyone's heard about it and should know that there's free trial periods to test it out. Plus it has very low system requirements so even a 10 year old PC should be able to run it. So what was their peak user base, 12 million? Yes that's damn impressive, but in contrast it's only a modest percent of all gamers out there. Last I heard Steam has about 70m users, so take consoles into account and I'd guestimate WoW has around a 10% appeal among the total console/PC gaming populace? It seems far less impressive when you put it in that perspective, and the Occulus Rift people here are talking about attracting a billion people? Best of luck but I wouldn't want to be in their shoes trying to figure out how to accomplish that!

Personally I love RPG's, but rarely can I get into an MMO. I think the Magic The Gathering people have the best explanation, as they've determined that their are 3 different player types and build cards to appeal to each: Timmy (munchkin power gamers), Johnny (creative strategists), and Tex (competitive winners). I could have the names wrong, but that's the general idea. Anyways, I firmly fall under the Johnny category, but we seem to be a minority in RPG's and are poorly represented in MMO's which seemed geared exclusively towards Timmy's and Tex's. The Tex's zero in on the most effective way to play the game, and the Timmy's who are simply looking to dominate are happy to look up the FAQs and follow along. This leaves little room for Johnny's to be creative and try out new things. Best MMO I ever found for a 'Johnny' was Guild Wars... not sure how Guild Wars 2 holds up as I've never played it. Other than that among all the WoW clones there's little else out there.
 

Lightknight

Mugwamp Supreme
Nov 26, 2008
4,860
0
0
Sure, why not? There's a lot of people who want to use the Rift to do a lot of things. As long as we still get the rift at the end of the tunnel I don't care what some people use it for as long as it doesn't become mandatory for me to do as well.