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Mark Zuckerberg has provided new information in the $2bn lawsuit between ZeniMax Media and Oculus, denying accusations that Oculus stole VR technology from ZeniMax.
The Facebook founder, who gave his testimony in the trial yesterday, said: We are highly confident that Oculus products are built on Oculus technology. The idea that Oculus products are based on someone else’s technology is just wrong.”
He added: It is pretty common when you announce a big deal or do something that all kinds of people just kind of come out of the woodwork and claim that they just own some portion of the deal. Like most people in the court, I’ve never even heard of ZeniMax before.”
Zuckerberg also revealed that Facebook paid $3bn to acquire Oculus in 2014 – not $2bn as it was publicly announced at the time. He said that Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe was originally asking for $4bn, as reported by the New York Times. They finally settled for $2bn but Facebook had to add $700m in order to retain Oculus staff and $300m should Oculus hit its goals.
Zuckerberg has also expressed some concerns about the current state of the VR market, which has yet to reach the mainstream.
I don’t think that good virtual reality is fully there yet,” he said. It’s going to take five or ten more years of development before we get to where we all want to go.”
ZeniMax started legal proceedings against Oculus in May 2014, two months after it was acquired by Facebook, claiming that the company stole trade secrets related to VR technology, which led to the creation of the Rift headset. ZeniMax then claimed yesterday that Oculus had destroyed evidence it had stolen trade secrets.
