Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days

Sony announces Project Morpheus 6 days ago. Oculus sells to Facebook today and deal started 5 days ago (apparently).<p>This is either<p>a) Founders saw writing on the wall and decided to get paid early rather than have to compete with a company with much deeper pockets and a preexisting fanbase.<p>b) Facebook saw that Sony&#x27;s announcement validated the space and decided to buy the company with most mindshare at the moment as it is an asset.<p>People have wondered why Microsoft didn&#x27;t buy the company? Well, Oculus have seen what, $90M in funding so far? The investors would have wanted what.. 5X 10X ROI?<p>At 5X.. $450M is a metric fuckton (excuse the language) of money that they could throw at in-house development of something similar. I imagine having a VR kit that integrates heavily with Kinect has the potential to be huge, so they at least have to be thinking about it.

&quot;Zuckerberg explained that he felt that Oculus represented an entirely new post-PC and post-mobile platform.&quot;<p>He&#x27;s probably right. While Google and others are focusing on half-baked wearables as their key to the future, facebook just bought a huge chunk of the most likely successor.

That makes Palmer look even more like a greedy bastard, and that all he cared about was money all along. When he heard the $2 billion amount he was probably like: &quot;So you want us to kill all of our gaming plans now, or should we wait a year to lay it easy on the fans?&quot;

&gt;&gt; Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, recused himself from the negotiations.<p>I would really like to understand how these sort of conflicts of interest are dealt with and if they are investigated by the SEC&#x2F;other government body...

A $2B deal over five days ... sure. A 100K funding takes at least 2months. And, check this &gt; <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wf6mg/so_no_way_to_confirm_this_but_my_friend_works_in/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;oculus&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1wf6mg&#x2F;so_no_way_to_...</a>

I can&#x27;t comprehend that John Carmack is now working for facebook.

To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million?<p>Maybe it is so hard.

I&#x27;m sure this just means that the legal back and forth happened over five days, not that the deal started five days ago.<p>This recode article has more detail which makes this much less of a sensationalist story: <a href="http://recode.net/2014/03/25/in-googles-shadow-facebooks-zuckerberg-pursued-oculus-over-several-months-ending-in-weekend-marathon-of-dealmaking/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;in-googles-shadow-facebooks-zuc...</a>

Virtual reality will never be reality.

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if a sense of awe of Zuck showing interest in the project helped shelve initial doubts about working with&#x2F;for such a behemoth.

I wonder if something (or somebody) forced this.