Chris Welch for The Verge:
Facebook plans to purchase Oculus VR, maker of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, for $2 billion. The deal is comprised of $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook stock. Facebook announced its surprise purchase via a blog post.
[…] Zuckerberg says that Facebook will “focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games.
It’s not much of a surprise that Oculus have been purchased, but I’d never have guessed that Facebook would be the company to do it. There’s been a lot of speculation about what this will mean for Oculus, but I’m just as curious about what it says about Facebooks plans for the future. Maybe the people saying that Apple will buy Nintendo has been looking at the wrong company. Facebook has pretty deep pockets as well.
This is a good time to go back and read Ben Thompsons article Social Conglomerate, which he wrote after Facebook bought WhatsApp. In a nutshell, the article’s about how we should stop looking at Facebook as a social network and start looking at it as a conglomerate of several companies with one thing in common: emergent technology. Oculus VR fits right in.