Oculus founder Luckey received 'death threats' over FB deal

March 31st, 2014, 21:06 Posted By: wraggster

Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey says he and his family have received death threats over his acquisition deal with Facebook.
Facebook announced its plans to purchase the virtual reality headset company for $2 billion last week, sparking a widespread backlash.
313261306020But Luckey says the uproar went beyond online rants, and that both he and his family have been harassed and threatened by people deeply unhappy at the news.
"We expected a negative reaction from people in the short term, we did not expect to be getting so many death threats and harassing phone calls that extended to our families," said Luckey via Reddit.
"We know we will prove ourselves with actions and not words, but that kind of shit is unwarranted, especially since it is impacting people who have nothing to do with Oculus."
Oculus vice president of product Nate Mitchell admitted last week that while the firm expected some bad feedback from core fans, it didn't expect the response to the FB deal "to be so negative".
"We assumed that the reaction would be negative, especially from our core community. Beyond our core community, we expected it would be positive. I don't think we expected it to be so negative," he said.
"As people begin to digest it a bit and think about it, you can see that Twitter and Reddit is swinging back the opposite direction," Mitchell added. "The onus is on us to educate people, and we want to share everything we're doing."
Backers of the original Oculus Rift have been heavily critical of the deal, bombarding the Kickstarter comments page with scathing messages.
Likewise, Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson also expressed his displease with the acquisition, to the extent that he publicly canceled a deal to bring Minecraft to Oculus Rift within minutes of the announcement.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...-over-fb-deal/

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