Oculus and Facebook have been very secretive about what their plans are going to be, ever since Facebook’s acquisition of the VR company. Now for the first time, some news is starting to surface about their future plans.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe just told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt about one lofty possibility for the pair: building a massively multiplayer experience for one billion simultaneous users. “This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR,” he told attendees.
So it seems that the real plan is to go big, and not just big in the gaming sense, but to have an even broader reach, to games and beyond.
While Iribe says Oculus is still as committed to games as ever, the company realized that a focus on games could artificially limit its reach. “Do you want to build a platform that has a billion users on it, or only 10, 20, or 50 million?” asks Iribe, noting that dedicated game systems don’t sell nearly as well as mobile devices in the grand scheme of things.
The final frontier is to create a virtual world where people can truly interact with each other, so not just games, but also build on social experiences with the platform, with a broad and great scope to reach many people around the world, and not just gamers.
It sounds pretty ambitious, but this might be the next big step, for what? Only time will tell.