Reality Bites

Sales are struggling, execs are jumping ship and investors aren’t convinced. Has the VR bubble burst already?

Perhaps, in hindsight, Brendan Iribe was always meant to leave Oculus. The co-founder and one-time CEO of the company that sparked virtual reality’s return has enjoyed a successful career, sure – but it’s one that’s been spent building up companies into perfect acquisition material, then walking once the deal’s done. He was a co-founder of Scaleform, the game UI middleware bought by Autodesk in 2011. From there he went to Gaikai, the cloud-streaming game technology Sony snapped up to lay the foundations for PlayStation Now. Iribe left Oculus in November, having been around since its inception in 2012. The cynic might wonder why he stuck it out for so long: Facebook’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Oculus completed in the summer of 2014.

But it was not a big cheque that prompted Iribe to walk out on Oculus. He’d already taken a de facto demotion on the chin, having been bumped from the CEO’s office in 2016 to head up a new Oculus division dedicated to PC-based VR. According to reports, the straw that broke the camel’s back for Iribe was the cancellation of the planned Rift 2, a powerful next-generation headset that would push the envelope for top-end VR. Since the acquisition, Facebook’s gaze has understandably shifted towards mobile hardware (such as the Oculus Go, a £250 headset released in May). This was always on the cards: Mark Zuckerberg surely never expected to recoup his staggering investment purely through the sales of powerful videogame hardware. Yet that rapid reassessment of Oculus’ priorities – turning PC-based VR first into a sideline, then a footnote – tells you all you need to know about Iribe’s decision to walk.