Author: Ciaran Laval

There have been a lot of column inches dedicated to the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR. The initial reaction has largely been negative because Facebook are involved, as I’ve said before, Facebook only have themselves to blame for this, their actions have spoken much louder than their words and they fully deserve the reputation they’ve got. However this doesn’t mean everything they do is inherently evil or anything they touch should be written off.

Steven Poole in The Guardian believes the backlash tells us that Facebook Just Isn’t Cool. I believe it’s because Facebook just don’t have a good reputation.

Amongst the comments and debate on the acquisition I’ve seen quite a lot of comments regarding the Kickstarter backers. A lot of people have called them naive, others say they seem to be self entitled. I really am not a fan of this term, largely because it gets thrown around whenever anyone has a different view. I’ve seen this term thrown around a lot in debates about the forthcoming Elder Scrolls Online subscription only model, when people suggest a free to play model may be better, others accuse them of being self entitled, when in all reality, they are just pointing out where the MMO market is heading in terms of business models and I say this as someone who pays a subscription to World Of Warcraft. However WoW is a different kettle of fish, but I’ll leave this for another post.

What a lot of people seem to be missing is that in business terms, the Kickstarter backers are active stakeholders in the project, albeit external stakeholders, but they are stakeholders none the less.

Stakeholders are an important ingredient of any business, so treating them with respect and dignity is important. There are different levels of stakeholder and some are obviously more important than others, however in an ideal world, you want to keep as many of your stakeholders happy as possible.

Where Oculus have gone very wrong in this regard is in not recognising that a lot of those Kickstarter backers would be miffed at the Facebook takeover and therefore, they made no contingency plans for it. Oculus really should have considered refunding them in the light of the Facebook deal.

The argument against this goes that the Kickstarter backers got what they paid for, the rest is tough titty. In The Guardian article I linked to earlier, Steven Poole wrote :

Meanwhile, there seems to be an obvious question of economic justice here. The original Kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift might not have been explicitly granted shares in the company, but the company wouldn’t exist without their initial contribution. About 10,000 people gave Oculus $2.5m between them. I for one am struggling to think of a good reason why each of them shouldn’t get a proportional share of that $2bn sale.

In the comments we see :

Perhaps the fact that paying for a T-shirt, thank you note or dev-kit on kickstarter doesn’t make you an investor in a company?

You dont invest with kickstarter, you pledge a donation.

Because that wasn’t a condition of their pledge. They weren’t making an investment, and the terms of what they were paying were clearly laid out. By buying a band’s t-shirts you are contributing money to their cause, but you don’t expect to get a share in their album sales.

I agree with the comments and disagree with Steven Poole, but only because the comments are technically correct, however a happy medium should have been found.

Continue reading “Oculus VR Have The Opportunity To Generate Good Will To Kickstarter Backers”