Before Facebook purchased start-up Oculus earlier this year, the company faced a crisis of legitimacy. Now, as per the company's CEO, since the takeover, the company has seen massive movement and more people lining up to boost its profile and propel it into the mainstream.
Facebook purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion and although both companies have remained almost silent on the goals of the deal, it appears the funding will help the Southern California start-up produce virtual reality headsets at a cheaper price without losing the production value of the devices.
CEO Brendan Iribe, who was speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt on the company's potential for growth, said the deal has opened up numerous doors for further expansion.
"This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR," he told attendees.
Iribe added that a billion-person MMO will "take a bigger network than exists in the world today," he admits that joining Facebook and its overall reach is a perfect place to begin and alluded to the possibility that the company could be a Metaverse that brings together virtual worlds.
Iribe said that the company is moving away from focusing solely on video games and believes that with Facebook's overall capacity for expansion, the company is now viewing their growth as potentially exponential since they have changed their company perspective and goals.
"Do you want to build a platform that has a billion users on it, or only 10, 20, or 50 million?" asked Iribe as the company goes beyond the gaming platforms it had begun with.
He added that Facebook takeover gave great ability to move beyond their initial goals.
He argued that investors are now seeing the monetization of the platform and he has been in development talks with top industry leaders, only now able to compete in the tech world since the Facebook legitimization has given them new plans for the future.
"We're all in. We're ready to start developing content for this. And so now for the general developer, there's greater chance that you're going to be able to develop something and then create a business off of our platform, knowing that with this partnership, it's going to be bigger, better, faster," he added.
Oculus now has the backing of a company already with over one billion users and with its own goal of reaching that number now a possibility and not simply a virtual goal, but a reality. The acquisition by Facebook has given new life in the company and has pushed it into the realm of established start-ups with real expansion on the table.
