• Facebook destroyed my startup

    I know a positive-sum development when I see one

    Yeah, sorry you don’t mind if I take it with a couple grains of salt please? Those two lines look like they could be in conflict with each other without more information.

    •  ericflo   ( @ericflo@lemmy.ml ) 
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      31 year ago

      I developed an early VR game called Soundboxing. It was a VR beat game before Beat Saber. It was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but Facebook repeatedly denied us access to their store with no explanation, bought Beat Saber, basically took over the industry and shut us out. They even sent us early Quest devkits that we spent 6 months porting to, only to be denied again. I’m super salty about it all tbh. But yeah, this is not that, this I see as an absolute win.

      • If this is not that, then what is it? Because I don’t feel either direction which way it’s going. Gut feelings aren’t the greatest metric to go by anyway.

        People have been burned by companies before, see Reddit, twitter, XMPP and a multitude of other situations. And people feel if we forget that and don’t at least take precautions against it that it will happen again.

        Also it’s been the case where companies have had good intentions, only to backtrack 2, 3, 4, or 5+ years down the track, forgetting their original reasoning - while it might be an absolute win now, the future is hard to tell. And on the internet a lot can happen. In 5 years. Just look how quickly the fediverse became relevant. How quickly Linux became a viable option for gaming. Shit changes so fast that it’s hard to predict what happens.