Palmer Luckey is once again causing headaches for his old partners at Oculus and Facebook after having left the company he helped form with his Oculus Rift VR headset on undisclosed terms earlier this year.
The VR wunderkind has pledged $2,000 a month to the developer of the Revive software, an application that lets games and software that'd otherwise be exclusive to the Oculus platform also play nicely with its rival HTC Vive.
Pledging his support via the developer's Patreon account, Revive developer Jules Blok confirmed Luckey's involvement in a blog post.
"As some of you suspected the sudden extreme jump in the pledge amount is indeed by Palmer Luckey. I’d like to thank him for his pledge and everything he has done for the VR community as a whole,” said Blok.
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It's a move unlikely to go down well with Oculus and Facebook, the social network giant having bought Luckey's platform for a giant $3 billion back in 2014.
Though it has angered the fledgling backers of the VR community, Oculus's approach to VR content has leaned heavily on funding exclusives, cutting them off from the rest of the growing world of VR hardware in the short term, and hoping that timed-exclusivity deals will garner some platform loyalty.
But despite making an estimated $700 million from the Facebook deal, Luckey's always seemed a bit at odds with his Silicon Valley peers. Always a proponent of open VR standards compared to those he worked alongside, Luckey was ostracised from a large proportion of the mostly-liberal Silicon Valley elite when he was found to be donating to an anti-Clinton political campaign during the 2016 US elections.
An annual $24,000 pledge may be pocket money to Luckey, but it's an action rich with deeper sentiment when you consider the circumstances with which he parted ways with Oculus.
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