Facebook's acquisition of Oculus has big developers coming in droves. The social network's backing has helped make the virtual reality brand appear as a stable platform.
In March 25, Facebook announced in a blog post that it had acquired the virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR for $2 billion.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe explained the reason he allowed Facebook to acquire the virtual reality company. He defended Oculus' need for financial backing by an entity as large as Facebook, otherwise, they might have had to cut back on their plans.
Developers also had to be assured that Oculus was a stable platform for which they could build apps. The acquisition did just that, and brought over the big guns as well.
"The biggest thing for us was that some of the really large developers out there who typically look at a platform and are late adopters to a new platform - because they need to see the monetization, they need to see the return, they want to see a huge audience - they turned around to us after the announcement and said 'We're so happy to see a new platform,'" Iribe said in an interview with TechCrunch during its Disrupt NY event. "It's about time. We're all in. We're ready to start developing content for this.'"
The vote of confidence that Facebook has given to Oculus convinced the developers to start building apps, despite their opposition of the acquisition in the beginning. Iribe explained how the general developers feel now that they will make a good business if they are going to develop something for Oculus. In addition, they have seen that the Facebook-Oculus partnership is going to grow rapidly and in a larger scale.
Developer adoption has skyrocketed since the deal was announced after the Oculus Developer Kit 2 went on pre-sale. Iribe announced that they sold as many units of Developer Kit 1 in its first 12 months as units of Developer Kit 2 in its first month.
