Big news, virtual reality geeks: John Carmack has gotten his wish, and Minecraft will absolutely, positively be coming to both the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR.
Carmack has been working the room since early 2014. He'd talked things over with Markus Persson face-to-face and gave him an early look at prototype hardware. Notch seemed to sour on Oculus after news broke that they'd been acquired by Facebook, but he later tweeted that he was over it and was more concerned about finding a hole in his favorite pair of socks. Determined, Carmack kept pressing. He coyly told Markus Persson on Twitter that all he had to do was “ship the source” and Carmack would “make sure it runs well on you-know-what.” Then Microsoft swooped in, threw bags of cash at Notch, and scooped up Mojang.
Then in November, Carmack tweeted “Who do I have to convince at Mojang[…]that Minecraft PE on Gear VR would be awesome?” Whoever it was, they didn't need too much convincing. At Oculus Connect 2 this week, we learned that Carmack's efforts had paid off. Minecraft Windows 10 Edition will support both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR.
Minecraft is believed by many to be the make-or-break app for Oculus. It's a sure-fire way to attract an insanely large number of users to the platform: over 70 million copies of Minecraft had been sold as of this June. Even if you cut that by a third (to very conservatively cover people who bought multiple copies) and then suppose that only 10% of those users are actually keen on VR, that's still around 2.3 million people.
“I think it's the single most important application that we can have to ensure we have an army of fanatic, passionate supporters,” Carmack says, and he's clearly not alone in feeling that way about Minecraft. One major reason Microsoft was willing to pay $2 billion for Mojang was so that they could use it to get people excited aboutHololens — and so far it's working.
Source :Geek
0 comments:
Post a Comment