The TechCrunch write-up almost exclusively focuses on the "Nimble America" thing. I'm sure that didn't help his standing at Facebook, but he's been doing other things besides that failed Reddit campaign. Some more context in the Ars Technica writeup (I hadn't remembered how much he was on the hook for the Zenimax charges):
> Luckey did appear briefly at a January trial in which id Software owner Zenimax Media accused Oculus of misappropriating trade secrets. While Oculus was cleared of the worst of those charges, the company was found liable for $300 million for various related charges. Luckey himself was personally found liable for $50 million in damages.
What was Nimble America anyway, and why the outrage?
The Daily Beast article isn't much help, talking about Pepe the Frog and "shitposting", with the banner picture, presumably the most egregious example they could publish, being Hillary's face with the caption "Too Big to Jail". Partisan, sure, but well within the realm of normal politics these days.
I got big into VR partly because of him, enamored by an interview of him my girl friend pointed me to in 2013. He was young, enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me.
Well, as the years wear on he, and oculus itself, has established more of itself from the hacker/open source vision. They’ve made enemies along the way, and many of the reasons people hate him/Oculus I disagree with.
It’s an infant field, they need to fund games to even having reasonable games. Making games have become increasingly expensive. Sure there’s a place for indie devs, but those games don’t draw the mainstreamers VR needs to take off like I, and many others need.
That being said, the things I’ve heard and seen from him make me think he does emobdy the gamergate “tech bro” (and I do use that as a pejorative) make my stomach churn. That I can’t really forgive, and don’t want to support.
The privacy aspects of a Facebook (or google for that matter) owning VR, and getting access to what we physically look at for advertising, is such a gold mine. Totally terrifying. That’s one reason my next system will likely be something like the Vive, inspite of me finding Oculus far more polished and fun to have.
I don't think a rich 24 year old kid, doing something that was widely considered an attack against the Establishment, is something that is highly unusual or bad.
It doesn't seem fair to forever conflate Palmer with Trump or assume that he completely agrees with him.
Maybe his tactics and philosophy are flawed, but I don't think his intentions are. Everyone's so quick to judge, demonize and forever cast people as bad.
He admitted to funding trolling memes to support the current President of the United States? He has to go away forever now, and we all have to pretend not to like him?
VR is anything but an "infant" field. Maybe today's incarnation, maybe amongst consumers.
But the idea of "gloves and goggles" goes back a long way - with its first real implementation happening by Ivan Sutherland ("Sword of Damocles" and the lesser known "Twinkle Box" for tracking in the late 1960s), then later work done in the 1980s and 90s by NASA, VPL Research, and Jarod Lanier, among others (which started the first VR wave).
If you have an interest in VR now, and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to check out the history of this fascinating, if still nascent and buggy, field.
I got a Rift over a Vive partially because I knew him, or at least knew of him, on the benheck forums back when we were all kids trying to make our own portable consoles. I was always impressed by his work ethic and designs. Enthusiastic, idealistic, and relatable were perfect ways to describe him back then as well.
>He was young (still is) enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me.
I would not describe him as idealistic or relatable. He's a self-identified Trump supporter/donator[0] and definitely has some alt-right leanings. Regardless of your politics, I think it's fair to say that someone with his political leanings is not considered "relatable" by a decent portion of Americans.
Why choose a headset (or any product) due to one person who clearly doesn't represent the company and who the company distanced themselves from and have apparently now fired?
I'm actually doubtful it has much to do with politics, if at all.
Dude is a world-class weirdo and an extremely bad communicator. So was Zuck, but he took media training and got..decent at it. Palmer didn't and hasn't, and there you go.
In general, if you run a product or company it is a bad idea to get political. You instantly create 50% detractors when you need to always win about 60% support. Hold off politics activism until you have fuck you money.
In most cases politics is a waste of time, change the world via the market and products and focus on your own success. Don't degrade your work by getting into politics, it is merely a divisive system today. Politics suck and they are past the point of grass roots influencing anything, only money works [1][2].
Palmer, like many other 20-somethings, got caught up in it. Political activism peaks around 27-30 ish, Usually by 30 you realize it is all bullshit and a waste of time other than voting and giving money to causes you believe in or that you think should win, quietly, on your own without sharing with the world your beliefs because others have differing beliefs.
Hm ... given Oculus' continued hegemony in the market place, and the high reward of supporting the United States' winning administration in the global marketplace, couldn't he just as easily not.... done anything?
Like there are still devs on Oculus, Trump won, every one with clout that supported him is now in power, and I personally had no idea
uhm yah he's probably got a lucrative VR contract signed up w/ DARPA, I think this is all show
Enthusiasts are _intense_, and the VR community is still all enthusiasts. At least partially because of the price, but probably also because of the severe lack of high-budget games.
So yeah, the Reddit echo-chamber keeps the hate going long after it would normally die in that kind of community.
Gizmodo had a regular feature called Palmer Watch stalking him, which ran for 117 days despite the fact that never never made any kind of public statement or appeared anywhere for that time.
Even before all the politics stuff he was not the best guy to have as the face of the company. His interactions with the community were sometimes pretty bad.
I wonder if he just wasn't happy with his role in the company.
Or, "if you're a public figure, or plan a public campaign supporting someone who is controversial, don't expect there to be zero criticism of your position because it's somehow sacred".
Tech sphere: "After Trump's win, we need to get out of our bubble and learn about what others are thinking in America."
What about engaging public figures in your industry who are Trump supporters?
Tech sphere: "Palmer needs to lose his job."
Why does diversity initiatives never seem to care about diversity of political opinions? Isn't a diversity of perspectives one of the reasons for diversity?
Anyone seeing this as having any connection to the VR industry as a whole is completely ignorant on the subject. Palmer has repeatedly shown himself to be a toxic liability to the brand, and this was inevitable to anyone who follows Oculus.
"He was just in the right place at the right time with a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack."
eye roll Really? He's accomplished more than most of the folks on this site. I really really hate the "They weren't an engineer therefore they're just background noise" mentality. A startup is a team. Everyone from executives to the doc writers are important, often in very intangible ways.
> He's not an engineer or a programmer, and has had nothing to do with the design of the consumer product. He was just in the right place at the right time with a neat hobby project that got noticed and picked up by Carmack.
You're belittling founders. Not all founders have to be programmers or designers.
Nothing in the entire article answered WHY he left. So it was because of the Trump thing?... Because that's stupid reason. Mark Zuckerberg who is the actual CEO of facebook is getting bad press on a daily basis and for much worse reasons than Palmer Luckey. Nobody outside of the tech community even knows who Palmer Luckey is but because he funded some trump trolls he gets ousted from the company he started??...something just doesn't sound right. Seems like a power play is happening behind the scenes and this is just an excuse
While not directly talking about Palmer, I'm not surprised that Oculus is having these sorts of troubles (co-founder leaving/lawsuit).
Being the first-movers in the VR space, or in the current wave of actually viable VR products, it'd be surprised if they turn out to be the dominant force in the space
Curious how this will affect Oculus, if much at all.
In the long run, I don’t think Oculus is good for the industry. Their room scale tracking hardware is inadequate, and their exclusive titles are dividing a fledgling market. I say this as a Vive owner and enthusiast. This along with the lawsuit… maybe it’s for the best.
I wish him the best - he jump started this entire industry, which was for a long time in the realm of scifi. Go and read his IAMAs on Reddit: he's clearly passionate and knowledgeable about VR. I hope he finds a proper outlet for his talents, now that he has the resources to do whatever he wants.
In my experience, innovators hate big companies. The culture and people there are all selfish, self involved, trying to "beat the game" by maximizing their RSUs, piggy backing on other people's work.
I'm not sure how I feel about this - ambivalent, I guess - pretty much how I felt after the FB acquisition.
I was a KS supporter - but I had followed Luckey for a while before on the MTBS3D forums, when he was just playing around, modding classic HMDs - mixing up the parts. He was one of only a handful of people that I could see who still played around with VR in that mid-to-late 1990s way. At the time, I thought that if there were anybody who could bring back VR, it was him.
I've played with DIY "homebrew" VR off and on since the mid-90s. I have a collection of old HMDs and other gear from the era. I've modded a powerglove, and at one time hooked it up to my Amiga and messed around with AMOS3D for fun with it. Later, Rend386...in short, I was disappointed to see VR die - so when the Kickstarter was announced, I was - to put it mildly - stoked.
That KS was the first one I backed (and not the last!) - I had high hopes, especially because Luckey had made a huge deal out of there being Linux support. With the FB deal, that was dropped, and that's when for me at least, the gilding rubbed off revealing a more base interior to the whole thing. Still, I had hoped that it would all lead somewhere.
In a way, I guess it did. More people than ever before got to play around with VR and such, and experience it all in ways that in the mid-90s I could only dream about (the tech just didn't exist at a price any normal person could afford). It was, though, a disappointment to hear that people were still having the same usage problems with this new tech that were the bane of VR back then.
Now it seems that once again, interest is waning. The hardware is still way too expensive for most people to come on board. People are still skeptical about what it is, whether it really works, or worried about side effects and other problems. Others simply don't understand the concept of immersion - or if they do, they can't seem to grasp why that would be such a great thing (I find it odd that some can't understand the idea of being -inside- a virtual world - a world of make believe, a world of dreams? One would think that would be something everyone would be gung-ho about, but I guess not).
Then to find out Palmer's true side, which - at least to me - wasn't apparent before; conservative, a seeming "I've got mine" attitude (and I don't begrudge his newfound wealth - in fact, I kinda proud for him on that mark), and bro-dude, let's support our favorite cheeto-in-chief...
And then the whole Zenimax thing.
For me, his reputation has been horribly tarnished. I'm glad he gave the whole VR thing another boost, but at the same time, it looks likely that this is the last great "hoorah" for the technology, and it will likely never get another chance again - at least not in the "gloves and goggles" classic form we've come to associate the term "VR" with.
I also remember the short lived VR craze of the mid 1990s.
As a kid back then, I remember trying some kind of 3d tennis game in an arcade, which was like $3 to play. What turned me off from it was a weird realization that I much prefer playing sports in real life with the bonus of not feeling nauseated and seeing cross-eyed after wards.
Thus, I would love to see this modern incarnation of VR applied to something more than just games...
> It was, though, a disappointment to hear that people were still having the same usage problems with this new tech that were the bane of VR back then.
I completely support and forgive Palmer Luckey. I hope for the world's sake that he goes on to do more great things.
There are truly bad people in the world. People who deserve to be hated. Palmer Luckey is very far from being one of them. If you're still piling on Palmer Luckey, you're a real piece of shit human being.
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/oculus-co-founder-pal...
> Luckey did appear briefly at a January trial in which id Software owner Zenimax Media accused Oculus of misappropriating trade secrets. While Oculus was cleared of the worst of those charges, the company was found liable for $300 million for various related charges. Luckey himself was personally found liable for $50 million in damages.
[+] [-] leereeves|9 years ago|reply
The Daily Beast article isn't much help, talking about Pepe the Frog and "shitposting", with the banner picture, presumably the most egregious example they could publish, being Hillary's face with the caption "Too Big to Jail". Partisan, sure, but well within the realm of normal politics these days.
[+] [-] moomin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marricks|9 years ago|reply
Well, as the years wear on he, and oculus itself, has established more of itself from the hacker/open source vision. They’ve made enemies along the way, and many of the reasons people hate him/Oculus I disagree with.
It’s an infant field, they need to fund games to even having reasonable games. Making games have become increasingly expensive. Sure there’s a place for indie devs, but those games don’t draw the mainstreamers VR needs to take off like I, and many others need.
That being said, the things I’ve heard and seen from him make me think he does emobdy the gamergate “tech bro” (and I do use that as a pejorative) make my stomach churn. That I can’t really forgive, and don’t want to support.
The privacy aspects of a Facebook (or google for that matter) owning VR, and getting access to what we physically look at for advertising, is such a gold mine. Totally terrifying. That’s one reason my next system will likely be something like the Vive, inspite of me finding Oculus far more polished and fun to have.
EDIT: Interestingly enough I asked him specifically on an AMA if he planned on staying at Oculus, his answer was an emphatic yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_p...
[+] [-] engx|9 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem fair to forever conflate Palmer with Trump or assume that he completely agrees with him. Maybe his tactics and philosophy are flawed, but I don't think his intentions are. Everyone's so quick to judge, demonize and forever cast people as bad.
He admitted to funding trolling memes to support the current President of the United States? He has to go away forever now, and we all have to pretend not to like him?
[+] [-] cr0sh|9 years ago|reply
But the idea of "gloves and goggles" goes back a long way - with its first real implementation happening by Ivan Sutherland ("Sword of Damocles" and the lesser known "Twinkle Box" for tracking in the late 1960s), then later work done in the 1980s and 90s by NASA, VPL Research, and Jarod Lanier, among others (which started the first VR wave).
If you have an interest in VR now, and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to check out the history of this fascinating, if still nascent and buggy, field.
[+] [-] kirrent|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewhy|9 years ago|reply
A year ago he said "I don't have plans to do anything else, so no real lamentations!", that seems like less than emphatic yes to me.
[+] [-] pillowkusis|9 years ago|reply
I would not describe him as idealistic or relatable. He's a self-identified Trump supporter/donator[0] and definitely has some alt-right leanings. Regardless of your politics, I think it's fair to say that someone with his political leanings is not considered "relatable" by a decent portion of Americans.
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-ocu...
[+] [-] dsaw|9 years ago|reply
Note : I have a Vive, which I bought after researching both (so I might be biased)
[+] [-] TwoBit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exogeny|9 years ago|reply
Dude is a world-class weirdo and an extremely bad communicator. So was Zuck, but he took media training and got..decent at it. Palmer didn't and hasn't, and there you go.
[+] [-] Mahn|9 years ago|reply
I don't know, some mistakes were made, but he was also pretty throughout in his Reddit AMAs. I think he does deserve some credit for that.
[+] [-] drawkbox|9 years ago|reply
In most cases politics is a waste of time, change the world via the market and products and focus on your own success. Don't degrade your work by getting into politics, it is merely a divisive system today. Politics suck and they are past the point of grass roots influencing anything, only money works [1][2].
Palmer, like many other 20-somethings, got caught up in it. Political activism peaks around 27-30 ish, Usually by 30 you realize it is all bullshit and a waste of time other than voting and giving money to causes you believe in or that you think should win, quietly, on your own without sharing with the world your beliefs because others have differing beliefs.
[1] https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem
[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
[+] [-] elastic_church|9 years ago|reply
Like there are still devs on Oculus, Trump won, every one with clout that supported him is now in power, and I personally had no idea
uhm yah he's probably got a lucrative VR contract signed up w/ DARPA, I think this is all show
[+] [-] devy|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps Palmer is able to 100% cash out all his stocks/RSUs today so he's out to do something else?
[+] [-] SteveNuts|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamvalve|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|9 years ago|reply
So yeah, the Reddit echo-chamber keeps the hate going long after it would normally die in that kind of community.
[+] [-] makomk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aanm1988|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if he just wasn't happy with his role in the company.
[+] [-] nebabyte|9 years ago|reply
If you don't know the answer to that by now...
[+] [-] dotnetisnotdead|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluthru|9 years ago|reply
What about engaging public figures in your industry who are Trump supporters?
Tech sphere: "Palmer needs to lose his job."
Why does diversity initiatives never seem to care about diversity of political opinions? Isn't a diversity of perspectives one of the reasons for diversity?
Tech sphere: "..."
[+] [-] nebabyte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aphextron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meddlepal|9 years ago|reply
eye roll Really? He's accomplished more than most of the folks on this site. I really really hate the "They weren't an engineer therefore they're just background noise" mentality. A startup is a team. Everyone from executives to the doc writers are important, often in very intangible ways.
[+] [-] istorical|9 years ago|reply
How insulting to Palmer, Mark Bolas, the Institute for Creative Technologies, and the wider virtual reality academic community.
[+] [-] ArlenBales|9 years ago|reply
You're belittling founders. Not all founders have to be programmers or designers.
[+] [-] djhworld|9 years ago|reply
He'll be fine.
[+] [-] dayaz36|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spondyl|9 years ago|reply
Being the first-movers in the VR space, or in the current wave of actually viable VR products, it'd be surprised if they turn out to be the dominant force in the space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Resoluti...
[+] [-] timdeneau|9 years ago|reply
In the long run, I don’t think Oculus is good for the industry. Their room scale tracking hardware is inadequate, and their exclusive titles are dividing a fledgling market. I say this as a Vive owner and enthusiast. This along with the lawsuit… maybe it’s for the best.
[+] [-] tannhauser23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nichochar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cr0sh|9 years ago|reply
I was a KS supporter - but I had followed Luckey for a while before on the MTBS3D forums, when he was just playing around, modding classic HMDs - mixing up the parts. He was one of only a handful of people that I could see who still played around with VR in that mid-to-late 1990s way. At the time, I thought that if there were anybody who could bring back VR, it was him.
I've played with DIY "homebrew" VR off and on since the mid-90s. I have a collection of old HMDs and other gear from the era. I've modded a powerglove, and at one time hooked it up to my Amiga and messed around with AMOS3D for fun with it. Later, Rend386...in short, I was disappointed to see VR die - so when the Kickstarter was announced, I was - to put it mildly - stoked.
That KS was the first one I backed (and not the last!) - I had high hopes, especially because Luckey had made a huge deal out of there being Linux support. With the FB deal, that was dropped, and that's when for me at least, the gilding rubbed off revealing a more base interior to the whole thing. Still, I had hoped that it would all lead somewhere.
In a way, I guess it did. More people than ever before got to play around with VR and such, and experience it all in ways that in the mid-90s I could only dream about (the tech just didn't exist at a price any normal person could afford). It was, though, a disappointment to hear that people were still having the same usage problems with this new tech that were the bane of VR back then.
Now it seems that once again, interest is waning. The hardware is still way too expensive for most people to come on board. People are still skeptical about what it is, whether it really works, or worried about side effects and other problems. Others simply don't understand the concept of immersion - or if they do, they can't seem to grasp why that would be such a great thing (I find it odd that some can't understand the idea of being -inside- a virtual world - a world of make believe, a world of dreams? One would think that would be something everyone would be gung-ho about, but I guess not).
Then to find out Palmer's true side, which - at least to me - wasn't apparent before; conservative, a seeming "I've got mine" attitude (and I don't begrudge his newfound wealth - in fact, I kinda proud for him on that mark), and bro-dude, let's support our favorite cheeto-in-chief...
And then the whole Zenimax thing.
For me, his reputation has been horribly tarnished. I'm glad he gave the whole VR thing another boost, but at the same time, it looks likely that this is the last great "hoorah" for the technology, and it will likely never get another chance again - at least not in the "gloves and goggles" classic form we've come to associate the term "VR" with.
Perhaps that's for the best.
[+] [-] natoliniak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abandonliberty|9 years ago|reply
Could you elaborate on this?
[+] [-] LeicaLatte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|9 years ago|reply
There are truly bad people in the world. People who deserve to be hated. Palmer Luckey is very far from being one of them. If you're still piling on Palmer Luckey, you're a real piece of shit human being.