Oculus founder and Rift inventor Palmer Luckey says he “truly believed” Oculus headsets would never need a Facebook login to operate, based on promises made during his time at the company.
Yesterday, Facebook announced that from October, first sign-ups for Oculus headsets will require a Facebook account. Existing Oculus accounts will continue to function as normal until 2023, when Facebook support will end and users will lose unspecified features. When Facebook first bought Oculus in 2014, Oculus executives – including Luckey – gave multiple assurances that users would not need a Facebook account to use their headset.
Following yesterday’s news, Luckey took to Reddit, claiming that he “really believed” that Facebook would not enforce such a requirement and that the company had promised him on several occasions. “I want to make it clear that those promises at that moment and on an ongoing basis were approved by Facebook,” Luckey said, “and I really believed that it would remain the case for several reasons. then justify me. ”
However, he revealed his own personal take on today’s news.
Luckey left Facebook in 2017 following reports that he donated $ 10,000 to Nimble America, a pro-Trump group, for a billboard featuring a cartoon by Hillary Clinton titled ‘Too Big To Jail’. That leaves a big gap between when Facebook apparently made these promises to it and when the company reversed that decision. In fact, the last remaining Oculus founder, Nate Mitchell, left Facebook a year ago. Luckey is now head of a defense production company, Anduril Industries.
What do you make of Luckey’s comments? Let us know in the comments below!
