Facebook Acquires Beat Saber Developer

It’s easy to forget that Facebook is technically in the games business, even if it is easy to feel disheartened when you remember that Facebook is technically in every goddamn business. They own Oculus Studios, the peeps behind the Oculus Rift, and they technically have a vested interest in seeing VR gaming flourish. Which is why it makes sense that they would flex their enormous budget and snag Beat Games, the creators of Beat Saber.

Mike Verdu, AR and VR Director of Content at Facebook, was quite pleased about the purchase.
 

"Beat Games is a strong team with proven potential across VR, games, and music. With the resources and know-how that we can offer, Beat Games will be able to accelerate, adding more music and more exciting features to Beat Saber as well as bringing the game to more people."

 
He made a point to emphasize that Facebook wouldn’t be sticking their fingers into too much of the Beat Saber pie. The studio would continue to operate somewhat independently. Updates to Beat Saber will also continue to be released for non-Oculus VR sets. However, as far as the modding scene is concerned – something that was very important to Beat Saber, as people were always looking to add new songs to the library, he was a bit more cautious.
 

"We understand and appreciate the value that modding brings to Beat Saber when done so legally and within our policies. We’re going to do our best to preserve the value that mods bring to the Beat Saber player base."

 
So. That’s probably bad.

Anyway, he also made a point to say that this would just be the first step of a plan to “accelerate VR” via a number of acquisitions. So we can expect to see a lot of studios fall under Facebook’s umbrella pretty soon…

…which is also probably bad.