Back in March, Oculus were bought by Facebook for $2 billion. The deal took much of the tech world by surprise because there’d been rumours that the console giants, Sony and Microsoft, had been interested in buying the VR company.
However, Oculus’ CEO Brendan Iribe says that “we were thinking the whole time that we wouldn’t partner with Microsoft or Sony.”
Iribe spoke about the deal at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, saying becoming tied to an operating system or platform would limit their potential. “If we were going to partner with somebody, because this is a long road ahead … we were thinking the whole time that we wouldn’t partner with Microsoft or Sony.”
Iribe thinks the Oculus Rift “needs to be a new platform” instead of partnering with another.
A potential contender was Google but Iribe worries that Oculus would be a side project for the company and he worried about “how much time we’d get from the leadership team.”
Plenty of developers have been working on Oculus Rift exclusive games, like CCP’s Eve Valkyrie, and adapting their games to the technology, like Techland’s Dying Light. They’re now waiting for Oculus to release a consumer version of the headset.