Carmack comments on why Facebook might be a good fit for Oculus VR

As you may recall, Facebook publicly announced it had acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in cash and stock early last week. Both parties published their official opinions of the union alongside large swathes of the internet-enabled public last week, and over the weekend Oculus VR CTO John Carmack -- a veteran programmer whose career spans Softdisk, id Software, and Armadillo Aerospace -- appears to have expressed his thoughts in a series of comments on a blog post by Peter Berkman. Berkman, guitarist and lead songwriter for the chiptune band Anamanaguchi, wrote about his growing concern that people on the internet were getting upset about Oculus VR's acquisition for all the wrong reasons. In response, Carmack -- or someone with access to his Twitter account pretending to be him -- published two comments outlining why Oculus VR was fated to be acquired by a much larger company and why that might merit cautious optimism. "Honestly, I wasn't expecting Facebook (or this soon). I have zero personal background with them, and I could think of other companies that would have more obvious synergies," wrote Carmack. "However, I do have reasons to believe that they get the Big Picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen. You don't make a commitment like they just did on a whim." Carmack went on to sympathize with the privacy concerns of Berkman and other commenters, but admitted that he doesn't have much of a problem with the prospect of Facebook collecting data from Oculus users. "Being data driven is a GOOD thing for most companies to be," wrote Carmack. "Everyone cheers the novel creative insight and bold leadership that leads to some successes, and tut tuts about companies ending up poorly by blindly following data, but cold analysis of the data is incredibly important, and I tend to think the world will be improved with more and better data analysis." You can read his full comments on Berkman's blog.