In the wake of Facebook’s recent acquisition of the crowd funded virtual reality headset the Oculus Rift, Minecraft creator Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has revealed that he has cancelled, “a potential free version of Minecraft designed to promote VR.”
This all began when Notch tweeted, “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.” This caused a small degree of backlash most notably from former design director at Epic Games, Cliff Bleszinski who wrote an impassioned piece on his personal blog defending Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition. Bleszinski explains, “Your device is only as good as the store and community around it; if users can’t say shut up and take my money, if developers can’t post their work then the device will ultimately flounder. Facebook can assist with this sort of thing, as well as having a multi billion user reach.” It’s a fair point, in fact it’s actually the exact reason why this buy-out may not be such a bad idea, but in closing Bleszinski takes aim at the Minecraft creator and begins firing from the hip with the following comments. “Notch, your cancelling Minecraft makes you look like a pouty kid who is taking his ball and going home. It’s a bratty and petty move and it saddens me greatly.”
What saddens me greatly is the fact that Notch then revealed, “the ‘ball i’m taking home’ was a potential free version of Minecraft designed to promote VR.” If this is indeed what Notch had planned then the Minecraft community certainly missed out on something very special as I’m sure virtual reality Minecraft would have helped tremendously as virtual reality gaming desperately tries to break into the mainstream.
As if all this weren’t juicy enough co-founder of Oculus VR, Palmer Luckey then expressed his scepticism as to the reality of this potential free version of Minecraft saying, “[Markus ‘Notch’ Persson] had the Rift for a year and had not even tried the Minecraft mod (which is really good), much less done any exploration work, I think Notch is a super cool guy, but it is really easy to ‘cancel’ a project that was never started as an out.”
More on this as it develops.