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

Steven Bogos

The Taco Man
Jan 17, 2013
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Oculus Wants to Use Facebook to Build a Billion-Player MMO


Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe wants to make an MMO with a billion simultaneous users.

If there's one thing to be said of the Oculus Rift, it's that the team behind it are "go big or go home" kind of people, and CEO Brendan Iribe is no different, announcing incredibly lofty plans for his vision of a billion-player MMO made possible by the device and its partnership with Facebook. "This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR," he told attendees at a Tech Crunch disrupt event [http://techcrunch.com/events/disrupt-ny-2014/live-video/].

Iribe does say that his vision is "going to take a bigger network than exists in the world today," but claims that Facebook's network makes a great place to start, and suggested it could be a Metaverse that joins disparate virtual worlds. Furthermore, he admits the company's alliance with Facebook was partly due to this reason - so it can reach as many people as possible, particularly those in the "non-gamer" crowd.

"Do you want to build a platform that has a billion users on it, or only 10, 20, or 50 million?" asked Iribe, noting that dedicated game systems such as the Nintendo 3DS don't sell nearly as well as mobile devices like the iPhone in the grand scheme of things. "Do we want to be a Game Boy or an iPhone?"

While we're not quite out of the "uncanny valley" of computer graphics, Oculus hopes to soon be able to convince players that they're having a "real conversation" with another person. "f you let go, you can have a real conversation with a person. That's the holy grail we're trying to get to," said Iribe.

Certainly some very ambitious dreams for an equally ambitious company. Basically, it looks like Oculus is trying to build "the Matrix 1.0," which i'm not sure how I feel about...

Source: The Verge [http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/5/5684236/oculus-wants-to-build-a-billion-person-mmo-with-facebook]

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mirage202

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Mar 13, 2012
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Considering MMO has been diluted to mean anything with social aspects this is not exactly causing me any excitement.

FarmVRille incoming.
 

1Life0Continues

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Jul 8, 2013
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"Welcome to Facebook VR.
Please click on and fill out one of these ad-loaded surveys that require a mobile phone number for $20 text messages to access your friends list to chat to someone.
If your survey fails to load, please try another one in the hopes you might try and fail to find one that doesn't screw you out of money in one way or another.
Alternatively, pre-load your account with Facebook Credits (purchasable in $10 increments) and have peace of mind you can call anyone on your list.
Access rates are $5 flag-fall plus $1 per consecutive minute after 5 minutes.
Thank you for using Facebook VR. You don't need to tell your friends, we've already spammed their newsfeed with notifications that you are using it."

Ugh.
 

Rabid_meese

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Jan 7, 2014
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They'll mess it up. The MMO will feature a slew of microtransactions that will bust the flow of the game, and gate communities between arbitrary time/pay walls. Just like every other Facebook game out there. ZING. OH SICK BURN.

I don't see how they could make a compelling MMO that could encompass 1/7th of the world. The upkeep alone would be a monster - Blizzard pays about 220,000 a day to keep theirs running, with only about 8 million players. They make that money back in spades, of course, but still. Multiply that figure by 100, and you STILL don't have the target range.

Plus, what could they really do? I doubt it'll be a fantasy RPG - that doesn't appeal to a billion people. Same with a shooter - I doubt Grandma will want to help me shoot some Russians.

It'd have to be some weird, complex life MMO. Which, I'm sorry, but I'm firmly in the camp that you can not re-create life in video game form and make it fun. Certain things can be streamlined by the internet - I don't think one of those is "going to the doctors" or "hanging out with friends". I could be wrong - its all speculation, and the market is an unknown force. But I just don't see it being a successful endeavor. It requires too many extraordinary things to happen. I think this was more or less rhetoric, or some fuzz to puff up a speech. YEAH, 1 billion sounds way more awesome then "we want 10 million people."
 

Airon

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Jan 8, 2012
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This sounds more and more like the Oasis every day.

John Carmack sorta equals John Haliday. Maybe they'll put out haptic gloves too.

Read "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline to find out about the Oasis. Great read in any case.
 

Karadalis

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Apr 26, 2011
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Smells like a molyneux.... you know that smell.. of half baked promises and overblown shit that was born from a feverish dream of world conquest.

A billion people? We only have 7 billion and most of them dont even have access to the internet. Get real man... all the companies that set their sails for the horizon and never looked back forgot that they had forgotten to lift the ancor named "reality" and wondered why half their boat was suddenly missing.
 

weirdee

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Apr 11, 2011
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did he just rip on the game boy

you done messed up, bro

we gonna have to take this outside
 

Alterego-X

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Rabid_meese said:
They'll mess it up. The MMO will feature a slew of microtransactions that will bust the flow of the game, and gate communities between arbitrary time/pay walls. Just like every other Facebook game out there. ZING. OH SICK BURN.
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.

Rabid_meese said:
I don't see how they could make a compelling MMO that could encompass 1/7th of the world. The upkeep alone would be a monster - Blizzard pays about 220,000 a day to keep theirs running, with only about 8 million players. They make that money back in spades, of course, but still. Multiply that figure by 100, and you STILL don't have the target range.
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.

Rabid_meese said:
Certain things can be streamlined by the internet - I don't think one of those is "going to the doctors" or "hanging out with friends".
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).
 

VanQ

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Oct 23, 2009
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So Second Life in VR with FaceBook users as the playerbase?

I'd rather kill myself.

Just hurry up and give me Sword Art Online already.
 

Hairless Mammoth

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Jan 23, 2013
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That's a great analogy in that third paragraph. One side is a dedicated system with a high "quality games" to "total games" ratio, and the other is a dumping ground for quick cash ins and poor quality shite that bury the few gems available and still makes tons of money. I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone which side Facebook fits into. And that's a direction Oculus wants to point some of the Rift market focus towards, an MMO full of Facebook style ads and micro transactions with the option to talk to your "friends" via off model avatars.

This is overly ambitious for a product that still isn't even out, much less one it general. Facebook might have over a billion users now, but not everyone is gonna want to pay $300(or whatever) to strap on a giant doo-dad to their face to play farmville and talk to someone. Even if they got all the gamers who didn't consider the Rift dead after the buyout, I doubt they'd hit more than 50 million(and that's being generous). I wish Oculus would just concentrate on finishing the thing and getting more game support so we can see if it really is the bees knees for video games or just a wearable TV with potential in military, training, medical, and therapy actions.
 
Mar 30, 2010
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Steven Bogos said:
"f you go outside, you can have a real conversation with a person. That's the holy grail we're trying to move away from," said Iribe.


Fixed that for ya.

/snark

OT: You can't really knock their ambition, but I do wonder if this would work in the real world (as it were). I mean, currently it's fairly easy to access social media in the workplace - I'm at my desk now - but I'd get rumbled for timewasting PDQ if I stuck that bulky headset on in the middle of the office.
 

seditary

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Between this and Activision's Destiny shit, it must be pass the crack pipe day.
 

Alterego-X

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Grouchy Imp said:
OT: You can't really knock their ambition, but I do wonder if this would work in the real world (as it were). I mean, currently it's fairly easy to access social media in the workplace - I'm at my desk now - but I'd get rumbled for timewasting PDQ if I stuck that bulky headset on in the middle of the office.
This year? Sure. The next? That too.

But on the long term, I'm wondering if the same forces that made a computer with an internet connection and access to social media so accessible at the workplace, will do the same to VR as well.

Maybe it will stay a gaming niche in the first place, but if it does reach that tipping point where hundreds of millions are using it for various leasurely activities, then it migh become the primary communication medium that the workplace will have to catch up to to stay connected to the ret of the world.

It would have other adventages too, a sufficiently high resolution VR display can simulate a multi-monitor work environment for you, or more practically, a 360° virtual desktop.
 

Doom972

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Dec 25, 2008
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There might be a billion of Facebook users, but how many of them would actually bother with an Oculus rift? All the Facebook users I know IRL use it almost exclusively on their smartphone. Even if that's not the case, what would make non-gamers or non-tech-enthusiasts want to get VR goggles?

At this point, I just don't see that happening.
 

BrotherRool

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Oct 31, 2008
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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
 
Mar 30, 2010
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Alterego-X said:
Grouchy Imp said:
OT: You can't really knock their ambition, but I do wonder if this would work in the real world (as it were). I mean, currently it's fairly easy to access social media in the workplace - I'm at my desk now - but I'd get rumbled for timewasting PDQ if I stuck that bulky headset on in the middle of the office.
This year? Sure. The next? That too.

But on the long term, I'm wondering if the same forces that made a computer with an internet connection and access to social media so accessible at the workplace, will do the same to VR as well.

Maybe it will stay a gaming niche in the first place, but if it does reach that tipping point where hundreds of millions are using it for various leasurely activities, then it migh become the primary communication medium that the workplace will have to catch up to to stay connected to the ret of the world.

It would have other adventages too, a sufficiently high resolution VR display can simulate a multi-monitor work environment for you, or more practically, a 360° virtual desktop.
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.

I'm not saying VR doesn't have a role to play or a niche to fill, but I just think that total immersion headsets like the Rift will take very much a back seat to partial immersion headsets like the Glass which allow people to interact with the digital world and the real world at the same time.
 

Alterego-X

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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?.
 

josemlopes

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Jun 9, 2008
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Grouchy Imp said:
Steven Bogos said:
"f you go outside, you can have a real conversation with a person. That's the holy grail we're trying to move away from," said Iribe.


Fixed that for ya.

/snark

OT: You can't really knock their ambition, but I do wonder if this would work in the real world (as it were). I mean, currently it's fairly easy to access social media in the workplace - I'm at my desk now - but I'd get rumbled for timewasting PDQ if I stuck that bulky headset on in the middle of the office.

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
 

Floppertje

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Nov 9, 2009
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yes, phones outsell handheld consoles because they're actually usefull for something besides playing games and because they can fit in your pocket. If you think a billion people are going to buy an OR, you really need to get yourself checked out. A billion dollar MMO is not happening. not now, not ever. Also, what would that even mean? Let's make an MMO for everyone on facebook?? what would it be about? what would you do?