Palmer Luckey and Notch spar over Rift quality

Founder of Oculus VR and the original creator of Minecraft, Markus “Notch” Persson, have been going back and forth via Twitter, with the latter suggesting that Oculus has fallen behind its main VR headset rival, HTC with its Vive. While Luckey countered, the back and forth shows the heated landscape VR has become, as the Vive pre-order time looms just a few hours away.

The history of Notch's thoughts on the Rift has been a long and storied one. An initial Kickstarter backer of the DK1, Notch famously dropped $10,000 on the headset, securing himself a visit to the Oculus VR studios. While he never took Oculus up on that offer, he did see fit to criticise it when it was purchased by Facebook – only to himself sell his studio, Mojang, to Microsoft just a few months later.

This latest back and forth took place when Notch suggested that he was quite gleeful that, “the HTC Vive is so much better than what I've seen so far from Oculus.” However Luckey showed up a few hours later to question his knowledge of Oculus content, which Notch admitted was years behind what's going on right now.

@notch Have you tried anything from Oculus since DK2?

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) February 28, 2016

“Well no, and now I'm totally called out on it,” Notch admitted. He continued by stating that “The Rift will always be my first love. I'm partially just butthurt. But my god the complete lack of nausea in Vive…”

The discussion that followed became far more civil, with Luckey pointing out how far Rift development has come. He even invited the Minecraft creator to swing by Oculus' studios to show what the company has been working on. Unfortunately for Luckey, it seems that Notch's financial success hasn't made him any more social, as he wasn't 100% on the idea.

@notch No suits!

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) February 28, 2016

Perhaps the promise of no suits will bring Notch down to Oculus' HQ to see what it's been developing. He'll have to deal with barbs thrown from other developers in the mean time though, as creator of Garry's Mod, Garry Newman, threw out a jab at the Microsoft-minted Mojang founder:

@PalmerLuckey @notch notch doesn't like people who sell their companies for billions of dollars

— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) February 28, 2016

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KitGuru Says: Notch has always seemed pretty hypocritical when it comes to Oculus ‘selling out' but a lot of people believe the Vive offers something Oculus doesn't. It's mostly a content thing however. The Rift will probably have the best and biggest library of seated and standing games, while the Vive will offer more room-scale experiences. At least until the industry evens out a bit.

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