Although it's never nice to hear about big name companies going after smaller ones, or developers having to defend themselves from overreaching conglomerates - like the case of Stoic Studio vs King over the 'saga' in their games' names - but that seems to be what's happening with gaming darling, Oculus VR.
But it is no longer the little upstart with a Kickstarter campaign, it's the monstrous child of Facebook these days, so that means it's doing the stomping and in this case, perhaps it's warranted.
In a nutshell, Oculus VR, wants OculusRift.com, which is owned by a number of developers and fans of virtual reality, who hosted a forum there for discussion around the headset and its contemporaries. In its complaint in their Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, Oculus VR suggests that the owners are merely cybersquatting.
That's not how the owners feel though. Ivan Smirnov contacted Kotaku to explain: "We’re a team of VR enthusiasts," he said in an e-mail. "We considered ourselves a part of the Oculus developer community. We’ve been building a developer-oriented community on social media and oculusrift.com for the last couple of years. As volunteers, [we spent] our personal time helping the company. For example, our Google Plus community has about the same amount of subscribers as the official one. If not more. We’re not selling anything. All our social media outlets/websites had zero advertisement."
As much as Smirnov claims innocence though, the Google Plus page that he talks about is called OculusRiftOfficial, and the Facebook page does repost content from the official source without referencing that's what it's doing. It's easy to understand how people could confuse it for a page run by official parties.
While the legal case begins, the forums have now been shut down. The message on the homepage thanks fans for visiting, but suggests that press coverage has been negative.
"The information in the article is one-sided and misleading. Maybe we were crazy to invest our time, money and effort in this project. Maybe we made some mistakes, but we tried, really."
What do you guys think?
