Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey has recently come under fire for giving money to support an unofficial Donald Trump meme creation group known as Nimble America. This group’s goal is to spread potentially offensive memes against Hillary Clinton on places like Reddit and other sites. Oculus Rift is a device that people look through that creates a world that one can mess around in the game world provided by the creator. In counteraction to this, people and corporations who are in the process of creating games for Oculus Rift, such as Scruta Games and Tomorrow Today Labs, have come out and stated that they will stop supporting Oculus Rift and instead focus on other VR competitors like HTC Vive and Playstation VR. These means that titles such as Computer Janitor VR, Transporter Room 3 created by Scruta and Newton VR by Tomorrow Today Labs won’t be coming to the system, which were going to be a good series of titles on Oculus Rift.
While speaking with your wallet is a good idea to fight for issues that you believe in, the prospect of canceling your support for something over one high-ranking member supporting something you don’t believe in is a little bit over the top. The problem with this is that Oculus Rift is not just composed of one man, it is a large corporation with thousands of people working for it. Oculus Rift was bought out by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. The beliefs of one man who doesn’t even own Oculus Rift anymore should not determine its failure.
There is a difference between a single person such as Palmer Luckey giving money to something one doesn’t believe in and an entire large company going against something. It would be a completely different story if Oculus Rift as the company supported something like this foundation. As an example, this scenario is different from the Chick-fil A incident in that the actual company helped provide funds to a foundation that helped promote the anti-LGBT movement. The whole company’s persona involves around these sets of beliefs and not just one man. If one does not want to support Palmer Luckey in the future because of this, that is in their rights. However, you should not attack the whole ship for one of its parts. I think the only major reason you should not buy an Oculus Rift if you had already planned to do so is because it is a bad product.
