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Blake J. Harris is the bestselling author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation, which is currently being adapted for television. Harris has written for ESPN, IGN, Fast Company,/Film, and The AV Club, and appears regularly on Paul Scheer's How Did This Get Made? toon meer podcast. He lives in New York City with his wonderful wife and their stinky cat, Itchy. toon minder

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“The History of the Future” is either the worst name for this book, or perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to one character’s reference to the impact virtual reality is expected to have on the gaming industry over the next few decades.

This book is not a history of the future.

For a few bright, shining years a very young man, Palmer Lucky, headed his own tech start-up in the promising field of virtual reality gaming. Virtual reality is really a synthetic, immersive gaming environment in 3D. Lucky and his colleagues sold the company, Oculus, for billions to facebook.

On the advice trusted venture capitalists, Mark Zuckerberg made one of his big bets in buying Oculus believing that it was the best of several attempts to bring virtual reality mainstream.

Given Zuckerberg’s resources, it was not a bad bet in my estimation.

Virtual reality has phenomenal upside, even for non-gamers like me. Humans use unconscionable amounts of resources to motor themselves around the planet to do things that could fairly be done in a virtual environment. Go to and from work. Visit the doctor. Go to school. Visit aged relatives. Attend a business meeting. Attend a concert. And the list goes on.

On one hand, this book is a story of a start-up. It is also the story of the rise and fall of a naïf and a sidebar to the story of Donald Trump...I kid you not! Lucky made the mistake of contributing to a non-profit supporting the election of Donald Trump that was labelled racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. When news of his involvement leaked, his future with the company and facebook was doomed.

More interesting to me, however, were the arguments Mark Zuckerberg made to Oculus. The biggest, of course, was the price Zuck was willing to pay. But Zuck also wooed them with the exclusivity of building the only interface with a facebook “experience,” and thus an attraction to developers and an automatic lock on potentially one billion users.

Zuckerberg seemed to be pitching some kind of a VR facebook experience, but the developers at Oculus were thinking of hitting a home run with a gamer experience. It seems that that buyer and seller were in different ball parks.

And this in a multi-billion dollar deal.

At face value it looks like the sellers really didn’t look closely enough at their suitor because immediately after the acquisition the principals were scratching their heads over attempts by facebook to integrate them physically in their workspace and culture.

For example, everybody at facebook used Apple computers, whereas the hardcore Oculus gamers were mostly PC users.

Also, the Oculus guys saw the advantages of leaving their games open to be used on other platforms. Zuck nixed that.

Oculus’ early fans were horrified that the platform was being developed by the evil facebook. The culture of facebook was and is so foreign to gamers. And we’re not just talking semantics.

Gamers really are different. And the games market is so huge that it’s really difficult to reorient them from the consoles and open source culture they come from. As big as facebook is, Zuck really bumped up into an immovable force.

In the couple of years since the facebook acquisition, Oculus devices have sold moderately well behind market leader SONY, and ahead of HTC. They are selling in the millions, good but not the killer app they expected.

This story is far from over.
… (meer)
 
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MylesKesten | 2 andere besprekingen | Jan 23, 2024 |
I'm just 15% in, but I'm willing to give it a 5 star rating right away. Funny, edgy, informative, fast paced. It's great.
 
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paarth7 | 15 andere besprekingen | May 6, 2023 |
There's two important points to make about this book:.

1. Harris is a good writer. His research and narrative work effortlessly guide you through six or so years of epic change.
2. Consoles just have no soul. Harris and his principal sources seem to never question how ultimately the console industry boils down to marketing brinksmanship and how hollow that makes the entire endeavour.

Maybe this isn't really Harris' fault, but the world of 80's-90's consoles (and probably still today) is so hopelessly full of corporate hagiography that we're led to believe everyone previously fabulously rich executive is a genius in this emerging world of video games. Tom Kalinske, Sega of America's president and Harris' messiah in a suit, is treated like a trailblazer for what--thirty years later--really just amounts to edgelord marketing. It's a weird lens on the industry that seems to gloss over how commodified and exploitative these same suits made their arena.

There are no creatives here. This isn't Masters of Doom or any other history of the creative rise of video games, but rather the celebration of corporate gaming. Even Sega's rise is ultimately depressing in that context. Console Wars is a great history... it's just that it's a documentation of the most banal process of extracting wealth from games rather than any form of creativity beyond ad-wizardry.
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Kavinay | 15 andere besprekingen | Jan 2, 2023 |
Over the past twenty or thirty years, virtual reality has become something of a joke. Many companies promised that they would be the one to make it a reality; all have failed. A California teenager named Palmer Luckey was determined to do something about it.

In 2012, he turned the trailer he was living in, sitting in his parents' driveway, into a VR workshop. Teaming up with legendary game designer John Carmack, early demos of the headset were very favorable. Gathering a colorful group of fellow employees, they decided on Oculus as a company name. Thus began the usual entrepreneurial journey of ups and downs. Reactions to the Oculus headset from those who tried it, continued to remain very favorable (the phrase "game changer" was a common reaction. Their Kickstarter campaign was very successful.

The company was eventually sold to Facebook for more than two billion dollars. The reaction of many in the hardcore gamer community was outright hostility. In 2016, Luckey did something very normal and reasonable (and very legal), but which created a public relations firestorm. Luckey became the most hated man in America. Things did not end well for him.

This is a wonderful book. For anyone who has ever dreamed of virtual reality, this is a must read. It also works very well as a purely business book. Maybe virtual reality's time has (finally) come. This is very highly recommended.
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plappen | 2 andere besprekingen | Dec 18, 2021 |

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