With Facebook’s recent acquisition of Oculus VR, the developers behind the Oculus Rift, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson has cancelled a deal with Oculus VR to develop block-based sandbox game for the Oculus Rift.
He proclaimed the cancellation via Twitter yesterday, March 25, stating that the Facebook “creeps [him] out.”
We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014
Notch went into further details on his feelings on the matter on his personal website . The deal to bring Minecraft to Oculus Rift sprung up when Notch considered the idea of slimming down the game to better perform on the platform. Two weeks later however, on Tuesday, March 25, Oculus VR is purchased by Facebook.
“Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts,” Notch wrote in a post on his website. “Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.
Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social,” he continued. “In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?
But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.”
Notch states that he wants to take part of working with virtual reality, but he doesn’t want to work with Facebook.
“Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.”
At the end of last month, February 27, it was revealed on Twitter that Notch was working with Warner Brothers on a potential Minecraft movie.