If you don't continue to punish them it sends the message that it's OK to do bad things if you back pedal. This is basically Facebook's strategy on everything including privacy.

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.

No, it sends a message that you shouldn't bother with the customers you can't please no matter what you do, and just focus on the ones who don't get so emotional about stuff like this.

How hard is it not to try to embrace extend extinguish the VR headset market. How can you possibly conflate those who aren't pleased with scummy companies manipulative nonsense with "can't please no matter what you do".

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.

We keep punishing because we're still not satisfied, and because we can't catch their wrong doing all the time so we punish them to detract from their aggregate gains from wrong-doing.

So, you punish them for their assumed transgressions. That's rather medieval of you.

The transgressions are not assumed. All they've done is reverted a small piece of DRM that was leading to piracy. They have not opened up their store at all. It's still completely closed to non-Oculus hardware.

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.

> They have not opened up their store at all. It's still completely closed to non-Oculus hardware.

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

Because it's anti-consumer and it stifles innovation. It's the same problem with console exclusives. It allows a company to release an inferior hardware product and crush the market by using other people's software offerings, rather than have to compete on the hardware front.

Same reasons why nvidia shouldn't pay anyone to make sure a game won't run on ATi cards?

Everything you've listed is well publicized and I'm quite unhappy about. "because we can't catch their wrong doing all the time" made it sound like you assumed there was even more that we have not caught, so let's keep punishing them based on that assumption.

The person you are responding to never said "because we can't catch their wrong doing all the time"

I'm not the person who wrote that.

Are 'punitive damages' medieval? If Oculus takes anti-consumer measures, then reverses course and consumers jump back on board as if nothing ever happened, why wouldn't they re-enact those measures once they have the leverage to do so? If HTC does capture the lion's share of the market, and they see there were no long-term consequences to enacting those anti-consumer measures, why wouldn't HTC do the same?

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.

I think for this it is twofold:

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.

Well, they recognize a problem, the community and them just disagree on what the problem was. The community views the problem as exclusivity deals. Oculus/Facebook see the problem as bad PR causing them to miss out on exclusivity deals they'd like to make and ineffective DRM (to be clear it isn't the DRM that they view as the problem, but that it was apparently too easy to bypass the DRM). Oculus "fixed" the problem by removing the DRM check (which wasn't doing much anyway), which they're hoping will also clear up that little PR issue. Once people forget about all this and they build up their market dominance a bit more, they'll take another swing at exclusivity deals in the hope that they'll be big enough to force the developers they want into it despite the community backlash it will cause.

The thing that bugs me about the whole thing is, the headset check does nothing for the fundamental implementation of the exclusivity deal. If I buy it through the Oculus store, then Oculus still gets their cut. After that, it really doesn't matter which headset I play the game on. The deal was still a success. I gave them money, and even did it on the storefront they sold the game on. What's the big deal?

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.

The entire reason for the exclusivity is to drive sales of their hardware.

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.)

Or, essentially, PC gamers would rather not trade control and cash for simplicity like console games have.

It's not just the storefront, Oculus sells headsets too. But even more than making money right now on software and hardware, they want to capture the emerging VR market, dominate it for years, and make even bigger profits when the market has grown up.

> They're only doing this because of the community reaction/outrage.

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.

I expect Palmer to come out and issue a public statement about how they violated the trust of their consumers, the lessons they've learned, and what steps they are now taking to mend the relationship that they've damaged.

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

Companies are people, but they're the kind of people whose only concern in "life" is increasing shareholder value.

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

> Continuing to "punish" them for something they fixed only sends the message that the fix was pointless

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

As a consumer it's a trust issue. How can I trust that they wont try to sneak this in some time in the future?

> How can I trust that they wont try to sneak this in some time in the future?

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

I think a "hey we messed up" would go a long way.

That won't happen because to them the only thing they messed up was the execution.

Companies shouldn't be able to get away with things until a critical mass of complaints begins to affect their reputation and revenue. Because they will continue to make poor decisions for the consumer until they get slapped hard enough publicly to stop it.

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.

They haven't fixed the problem. They just removed one particular bit of DRM because it was immediately thwarted and then led to piracy of their content. It's still the case that the Oculus store is completely closed off to all non-Oculus hardware without using third-party hacks.

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.

All non-Oculus hardware... aside from GearVR, Samsung's HMD.

Gear VR is actually an Oculus product:

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

What do you think about these cases I made up:

"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."

Let's compromise.

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

What's funny here to me at least is how they could come out with a comprehensive statement about how they got off on the wrong foot and screwed over their early adopters, broke promises about DRM, etc and win back a lot of support. The only reason which I can imagine they're not doing exactly this right now is because they're planning on doing the same types of things in the future.

We don't all look at corporations like our own children: "sure they screwed up but as long as the fix it all is forgiven." We look at corporations as full grown adults who only get one real chance. Think about all the strategy that went into the DRM change, there was a lot of thought behind the decision, which revealed true long term intentions. This was not a momentary temper tantrum, this was premeditated. You can expect something similar to happen in the future with the rift. Worst case...Rift proves the market and does a whole bunch of R/D that 2nd or 3d generation suppliers can capitalize on. I will not be purchasing a Rift, ever.

The general rule of thumb is that trust is easier to lose than to establish, and that punishment should far exceed the crime. Absent that, the "ask forgiveness" strategy tends to take hold, requiring relentless vigilance and generally wasting everyone's time.

When you do a bad thing, stopping that bad thing when being called on it doesn't mean everything is suddenly fine again. You still get punished. Your reputation still suffers. And people will be less likely to trust you.

They destroyed their customer's trust.

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

Firstly companies that have done this before will do this again. Also companies respond to incentives so it’s important to heavily disincentivize things that you really do not like. This level of douchebaggery I think merits needs some consequences

Never mentioning the poor behaviour doesn't reinforce the message. When you teach a child you have a continual need to do this, "I don't want a fuss like Saturday when we do this, I want you to behave, like yesterday" then ideally get them to say what's they are going to do. Corporations are clearly like young children in my mind.

Why would you trust a company when you know they only care about you to the extent that it affects their bottom line?

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