And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?
Carmack took his emails with him on a USB stick (which Zenimax's lawyer called "10,000 confidential documents") but the jury didn't award any damages for that.
Kind of irrelevant though, as the article is wrong, and it's actually Luckey and Iribe who are personally liable, and not Carmack.
A lot of times Carmack just wants to get shit done. At Oculus he has worked on both the Minecraft code and the Netflix code both for VR clients, both (I believe, I know for sure for Minecraft at least from some talks) with MS and Netflix retaining full ownership of the code.
Maybe they have some "off the record" agreements to avoid anti-trust--Minecraft still hasn't officially come to Vive.
None of this has anything to do with Zenimax owning his "mind" or "time." It's about Carmack using company resources to enable Oculus. This becomes even more concerning when you consider that Carmack was one of their most senior, if not THE most senior engineer at the company. He's compensated handsomely under the assumption that any great ideas he has will end up with the company. This is similar to executive compensation strategies and carries with it very similar assumptions. The situation is a little more than some ordinary employee exploring their hobby and getting lucky.
This is like a CEO getting hired, being awarded a multi-hundred million dollar contract, not doing a single thing for the company that hired him, advertising for a competitor, leaving once his contract is up and also convincing numerous other executives to leave with him at the same time. That's extremely unethical in my opinion.
How much all that is worth is debatable, but the court seems to think it was worth $500M.
zenimax didn't have a VR headset to sell, or plans to make one
Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4.
that...is what he is supposed to do!
Your allegory is ending a bit too soon and missing some nuance: Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a Playstation 5 prototype, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS 5. He then leaves Zenimax to work for Sony - on the PS 5
He was a game programmer. He was porting his company's game to upcoming hardware. I fail to see what's even a tiny bit inappropriate about that.
The same thing he was doing when starting Id software working for another company a couple of decades ago.
I don't think he was treating this very rationally...it was like love
(I don't think he works the way you describe at all).
[0] https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200002...
Note this wasn't some submarine patent troll out of nowhere. This was a Zenimax employee working on another company's product on their time. This was also about NDA violations and a boatload of shady dealings by Facebook who famously bought Oculus over the weekend and left no time for a proper discovery of liabilities. There's little controversial about this. Carmack and Luckey were simply wrong and Oculus should have worked things out better with Zenimax. FB needs to do better due diligence. A lot of bad players were punished today. The VR industry is too young and fragile to have these shenanigans become the norm. Signaling to investors that VR IP is protected is a good for everyone.
The HMD was functional before Carmack got involved. For example, Hunger in Los Angeles (https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-s...) used the PR4 prototype unit months BEFORE Carmack requested a version to try out. It had position tracking and optical pre-distortion at this time. So those concepts were around before Carmack was involved. As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. The Hillcreast IMU Carmack wrote hard-coded support for (which you can look at in Doom BFG and see for yourself) was not even used for the final DK1, let alone later models. The used IMU was created by nrp as the 'adjacent reality' tracker, later hired by Oculus (and you can see the code for THAT tracker too, as both the DK1 and DK2 have had their source released on github).
Despite the first two development versions of the Rift having source available, Zenimax have yet to point to a single line of code as "ah-HAH! you copied this!".
Carmack's key work went into GearVR, not the Rift, where he worked with Samsung on the low-level changes to android (bypassing the Android compositor and USB stack, implementing racing-the-beam asynchronous timewarp).
Not that it matters for your point, but it was the other way around. They are using a mesh based pre-distortion now.
>Although the exact distortion parameters depend on the lens characteristics and eye position relative to the lens, the Oculus SDK takes care of all necessary calculations when generating the distortion mesh.
https://developer3.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/con...
Also what about all the flippant allegations Zenimax was making about Luckey's technical expertise?
What about the allegations that the IP was from Zenimax proper?
The damages break down to $50M for copyright infringement, $200M for failing to comply with the NDA, and $250M for false designation.
While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd.
That all depends on if the demo was the deciding factor in the multi-billion dollar buyout.
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable.
It's Carmack's video that lent credibility to the campaign.
And it's Carmack's original IP (Doom) that made the demos compelling.
It may be a weird system that Zenimax is entitled to $500m but since Carmack was an employee, under contract with Zenimax - who had paid >$100m to buy him / his IP - it sounds like this was a fair verdict.
(1) https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Faceb...
(2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-...