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Does Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey's name say it all? His father was a car salesman and father like son, he is the world's best salesman. We have all grown to love him.

The recent Oculus Rift deal with Facebook has created a real rift with OR kickstarter supporters. The question is: were the OR creators simply overwhelmed and kidnapped by venture capitalists as babes in the woods or were they spinning a "garage startup story" with their fans?  In one single move, OR went from having Apple-like fanatical support base to being regarded as everything that is wrong with the current Guilded Age we are in these days. 

But Kickstarter supporters who gave him the $2.5 million expected to at least see him put out a 1.0 production model rather than flip the company a mere two years after starting it. Everyone knows there are crazy acquisitions these days by Facebook, Disney and others but the main differences here was that OR used fan/supporters to get going enough to flip the company. But the Kickstarter campaign is what has angered most of his fans. When new entrants like Sony, Verve, Microsoft, Google and others roll out new products, OR will not get lots of "Likes" on facebook and their early supporters will swarm to it competitors. As they say in the action movies you will doubtless now watch in virtual reality: "payback is a bitch."

The larger fallout from all this is that large projects like this one has turned out to be will have a harder time getting money from Kickstarter fans. Who wants to be a technology incubator for fat cat venture capitalists the logic will run. Kickstarter is blameless in this matter and will be hurt as well. Their "cool vibe" will get beat up a fair amount. We also expect to see an angel-style Kickstarter start up where you get real equity. Hey... I need to run now and start that idea up!

FREE TO PLAY Documentary Movie

Great free documentary movie about how video game players from around the world have gone professional.

Straight from the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, is Sony's prototype virtual reality headset which is code named "Project Morpheus". (Ovid's Morpheus was the God of dreams and sleep- Sony better bet on the former but not the later!) This is CNET brief but good report explains it all.

We are blown away. One of our simple Tweets was favorited by an amazing guy: Dong Nguyen

If you play mobile games, then you know “Flappy Bird” which was created by Hanoi-based indie game creator Dong Nguyen and has been touted as the next “Angry Birds”. The game is an 8 bit old school looking “jump and run” frustratingly addictive game. But he pulled the game off the stores a month ago and walked away from its hit explosion. At its peak, the game was allegedly making $50,000/day. That would be $18 million, annualized, if it had theoretically gone on to have a life beyond being the 30 day hit wonder most games are when they hit the Top 10 Lists. We will say it again: he pulled the game as it was blowing up!!! Doing so would be the equivalent of Rovio pulling its first version of “Angry Birds”. Need some reminding? Rovio made $195 million this last year with its “Angry Birds” franchise and has been making millions for years now.

No one knows exactly why he pulled the game. There are various stories ranging from threats to personal issues. One of the most accepted explanations is that the pressure grew too intense for him to handle. Nguyen is an indie developer who, like most indie developers and unlike large game companies, develops games out of his personal love for the medium and messing and mashing up game genres. We suspect that it was never about making huge sums of money for him. That is our theory for now anyway. Suddenly his game got rockstar status and when that happens and big money is concerned, all sorts of unintended consequences start to take place. Things which he didn’t maybe didn’t intentionally sign up for originally or even considered.  What started as a love and personal passion for the medium and the  creative process, ended up being a nightmare. More importantly, he became concerned that people were getting too obsessed with his game.

For people who love science fiction space games, here is the ultimate experience:

If you are not aware of the massive space SIM MMO game being built by Cloud Imperium called "Star Citizen”, you need to check it out. The entire game is being built in real time but the process is wide open to its fan base. You join the community and interact with it. As a member, you get tons of updates, access to forums, magazines and can actively offer suggestions to the "Star Citizen" creators which they consider. More than anything, they are creating the most high rezz game ever created using Crytek CryENGINE (for you geeks out there - www.cryengine.com). In short, you can become a sort of an active collaborator with others crowdsourcing the creation of the game. You get to see what it is like to build a huge, multi-year game which will eventually have millions of players. 

Unlike traditional game companies which spent millions of dollars behind closed doors for years and then "launch" or "drop" a game after 3 years of work, "Star Citizen's" is a "build-as-you-go" experience... sort of like a behind-the-scenes reality show about making one of the world's biggest digital games on the scale of "World of Warcraft.".

The following, (just one example, is a competition they ran for spaceship and weapons designs judged (ala "Top Chef") by a panel of folks, including the legendary Chris Roberts, the creator and creative director behind the hole game. The design teams are from around the world and anyone can get started in the contest by simply downloading a free copy of Crytek’s CryENGINE and start creating along with the Cloud Imperium team. 

No other video game, this large, has ever been created this way.

Check out gamerista's 2014 Scenarios for the Future of Gaming

"Journey" by thatgamecompany which was released in 2012 and won every important game award know to the human race.  

If you know about "Journey" and regard it as old news, you still would enjoy the great Wikipedia article on the creation of the game which I stumbled across doing something else in the digital neighborhood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)

I saw some of the early "Journey"story boards at their Santa Monica studio some years back but never knew it would become this amazing game. BTW, there is a gorgeous coffee-table book on the artwork titled "The Art of Journey".