Minecraft Cancelled for Oculus Rift

Markus Persson, developer of Minecraft, announced over twitter today that he has cancelled plans to bring the popular sandbox game over to the Oculus Rift following Facebook's acquisition, stating that the social media site "creeps [him] out." 

In a blog post later that day, Persson discusses his trip to Oculus VR's office not a month earlier where he tried out a more polished prototype and began talking with the team about potentially designing a "slimmed down" version of Minecraft for the system.

While initially extremely excited for the Oculus Rift--Persson was one of the top-level backers of the initial Kickstarter--the indie developer balked at the idea of developing for a company like Facebook, which recently acquired the Oculus Rift for $2 billion:

"Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build." 

Despite being positive about the technology's potential as for social applications, Persson is firm in his statement that he's personally not interested in working with social technology; he wants to work with games. As a platform, Facebook has been notoriously unstable and opaque in their goals in the eyes of the indie developer.

Fans, however, did not see their dreams of a VR Minecraft entirely dashed. In his blog post, Persson noted that "fortunately, the rise of Oculus coincided with competitors emerging" and that he is still very eager to develop for and become involved with the cutting edge of virtual reality gaming. On twitter, his initial announcement that the deal with Oculus was cancelled was immediately followed by a tweet mentioning the already existing mod that ports Minecraft over for the Oculus Rift.