They did something bad, the community reacted negatively. If they fix the problem, rewarding them is going to make sure it sticks around.

Continuing to "punish" them for something they fixed only sends the message that the fix was pointless and that it would have been better to ignore the problem like so many other companies (including Facebook themselves) do.

Let's say they want to implement some new feature that they know will impact user privacy. They push two steps further than that they really want. Then when users backlash, Facebook takes one step back. Everyone is happy and Facebook gets more than they originally intended. Rinse. Repeat.

Its actually relatively easy to please most people. Make something worthwhile, take their money, fix it when it breaks.

It usually becomes complicated because people want to give people as little as possible, rake them over the coals as hard as possible and blame someone else when it breaks.

Perhaps you're missing context to understand why people are upset. Oculus has went so far as to actually pay developers of open, non-exclusive VR games to restrict their games to the Rift and Touch only, either indefinitely or for a period of at least six months. These are games that were already in development. In one case, people had even pre-ordered Giant Cop for the Vive through the Humble Bundle, but Oculus purchased timed exclusivity rights for the game afterwards.

It's a really nasty situation, and Oculus deserves every bit of criticism they've received. This reversal of a tiny piece of their overall exclusivity strategy does not in any way diminish or undo everything else they've been doing. In fact, it's completely irrelevant for anyone who wasn't planning on pirating content.

i don't follow this VR stuff; why should Oculus do that?

These companies aren't your friend. As is always stated, they exist to make money, whether that's in the best interest of the consumer or not. That's capitalism, that's fine. Certainly in this space, I don't think anyone is realistically arguing that there is some better method (would the R&D emerge to create and market VR in a communist society? Seems unlikely to me). That doesn't justify not taking punitive action against anti-consumer businesses/actions (Facebook, e.g.); for the system to work, consumers need to be avidly pro-consumer.

1. They're only doing this because of the community reaction/outrage. I want to be able to trust a company to at least appear to have my interests in mind, I don't want to have to be ever vigilant, ready to "freak out" whenever they do something bad in order for them to respond and actually fix it. They're showing that they only care that we noticed them doing shitty things, not that they're actually concerned about doing shitty things.

2. They are not in anyway apologetic for what they've done. They don't see their previous actions as a bad thing, they just see them as undesirable given community reaction. A key component to conflict resolution is not perpetrating in the future, which generally requires at least an acknowledgement of past problems, how can I trust an entity that has solved a problem that it does not even recognize it as a problem in the first place?

Both of these issues make me extremely distrustful towards the company as they both indicate a high likelihood of screwing customers over in the future.

I still think exclusivity deals are a bit bogus to begin with, but I think a perfectly reasonable compromise is to be exclusive to a particular storefront, but not a particular device. If another device shows up with the right capabilities, and the community is willing to do the leg work to port my legitimately purchased game to it? Awesome! Rah rah community, you've just expanded my potential market considerably, for no effort on my part.

The only real advantage I can see for a developer to be exclusive to hardware at this point is to cut down on development costs in the first place. The hardware platforms are emerging, very different, and not always compatible, even if it seems like they would be on the surface. So I can understand the reservations against wanting to code for or support more than one complicated VR setup. But if anything, it's been shown that the VR community right now is chock full of enthusiasts and tech--savvy people who will happily take a stab at those sorts of complicated ports all on their own. I think it's important that they have the freedom to do just that.

If they need to sell 500 units of hardware or 5000 games to break even on a given investment, and selling that hardware also increases the odds that you'll purchase other exclusives from their store once you've sunk the cost, there's plenty of motivation to do it, even if you don't end up buying most of the exclusive games.

(Note that I am not weighing in on the ethics of this, just remarking that there is a legitimate business reason to do it.)

Well duh. If the community was delighted about it or didn't care then was it really a bad thing? What do you expect a company to do, get everything right the first time no matter what, or suffer punishment? It seems they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Just like, you know, how you'd treat another human being you hurt.

Agreed that I'd rather get a Vive once there are some games out that I care about playing on it.

It also sends a message to other companies that things like this aren't forgiven easily, whether or not that's the immediate intent.

They will. They'll just have to do it more slowly than they thought.

Brand loyalty means something for a reason. Oculus squandered a lot of community trust here and that doesn't instantly return by reversing the poor decision. They knew what they were doing and they did it anyway and didn't stop until public pressure became too much to ignore.

Ultimately, though, it's about trust more than punishment. Oculus lost mine. And now they'll have to actively work to regain it. This one rather tiny move is not sufficient.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/gear-vr/

"I am sorry officer, I realized that you were coming after me to detain me for stealing. There's no need! I'll just put these back."

"I've been bullying all other kids since years. I've realized that's why nobody wants me as their friend. I will cease the bullying immediately and I'm sure they'll invite me to the big party tomorrow."

I hope that Oculus still gets some shit for attempting to lockdown their ecosystem. But less so than before this.

This isn't "punishment", it's the free market in action.

Especially a company like Facebook. Have we forgotten the Free Basics debacle already?

You're kidding right? Oculus was very generous to early supporters. Name one other Kickstarter project that shipped backers the full retail version of the finished product in addition to their original purchase.

Yeah there was a slight delay, but really, original backers came out pretty good on the deal.

Disclosure: I was an early backer. My free retail Rift arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I'm happy.

Consoles have had exclusives since time immemorial and no one seems to bat an eye when it happens. What makes this case special?

There are real differences in the Rift/Vive systems right now in terms of what they're capable of (Vive has touch controllers, Rift won't get them until a few months down the road), but hardcoding a check into your DRM that makes sure that you're using the correctly branded headset is just asinine. There's no real differences between the headsets themselves that justify it, it's just artificially trying to cut out competition.

I think people have been particularly vocal here because a) the exclusivity ship sailed for consoles decades ago while the VR market is fresh, b) because the market for 1st-gen VR is mostly early adopters who pay attention to these things and have strong opinions, and c) because Oculus have seemingly been saying one thing and doing another.

By the way, Valve is supplying quite a bit of funding to VR developers as well but is somehow managing to do it without requiring exclusivity. At the very least, Oculus could require store exclusivity but not hardware exclusivity.

Finally, just because one demographic has gotten used to it (console gamers) doesn't mean it's right. Many folks understand the dangers of exclusives, and they want to prevent that from creeping into PC gaming.

Their massive share of teh PC gaming market via steam gives them more freedom.

That is, they behaved like they this even when they were not kings of the market, so the reasoning behind this is more akin to company culture than it is to market strategy.

This just goes to show why it's important to take a stand now, before we internalise this new, worse state of affairs and stop being outraged.

Edit: technical reasons aside, I guess there is no difference. But at least one excuse can fall back on semi-technical reasons... This sort of exclusivity is purely for marketing and contractual reasons. It actually requires more effort to make the game exclusive than it does to make it multi "platform".

It's quite a stretch to say that VR is "just a new way to display a game," in my opinion.

if I then plug the display into my video card; then that makes it a head mounted monitor with drivers to output data specific to that display.

Valve forces devs that take their money to have their game on Steam until they have paid back the loan. That's not exclusivity but it's also not no-strings. Valve has an agenda just like Oculus.

And it's not quite a loan. It's prepaid Steam revenue.

The only thing that would make it nasty is if there is nasty clauses in the case you are unable to meet the prepaid Steam revenue. However I don't know the answer to that.

That I'm not so annoyed with. Their retail contracts would have had set due dates with penalties for breaching them. The backer headsets were giveaways right? They weren't promised when they originally ran the Kickstarter as I recall.

as far as never heard of VR... what planet are you on :D VR has been around since we could fit screens on our heads, like crt style. edit: spelling

To make money. Woah!! A business trying to make money!!! How dare them!!

That's like arguing it was okay to cheat on your wife because of the state of the relationship. It's a douche thing to do either way.

If the market you're in is very competitive, and all the customers buy from "mean companies" just because they're cheaper,

then being nice, if it's expensive, will run you out of business.

The airline industry is very similar to this.