Facebook and Oculus sentenced to pay $ 500 million to Zenimax

A few days ago we echoed a news related to Oculus and its virtual reality system. Zenimax, one of the most important video game companies, of which ID Software is a part, sued Oculus and its creator Palmer Luckey, requesting 4.000 million dollars for the use of the technology that one of its first signings, John Carmack who became director of Oculus technology, he had subtracted from Zenimax when he left the company to join this ambitious project in 2012. John Carmark was one of the founders of the Zenimax company but when Palmer Luckey He presented the project he had in his hands, decided to abandon his previous life and bet on this winning project, a project that two years later was bought for 2.000 million dollars by Mark Zuckerberg.

Zenimax claimed that the Oculus code contains a large part of the research that the company had developed years ago in this field, so Zenimax's intellectual property had been infringed to create the Oculus Rift. The jury has estimated that Facebook, owner of Oculus, must pay $ 500 million to the Zenimax company, for having used the technology developed by Zenimax and that John Carmack I wear when he signed up for Oculus. The Zenimax company are the well-known game developers such as Wolfestein 3D, Quake, Doom, Fallout… through ID Software or Bethesda.

Mark Zuckerberg himself was forced to testify at trial to try to convince the jury that at no time had the code developed years ago by Zenimax been used in the development of Oculus. This ruling leaves not only Facebook in a very bad place, but also Palmer Luckey, who had been considered a guru in the field of virtual reality when he launched his fundraising project on Kickstarter to carry out his project.

The sentence, composed of 90 pages, it can be appealed, but it seems unlikely that it will, after seeing the little evidence that he has been able to contribute to the trial to defend himself against the Zenimax lawsuit, which also suggests that it was not Oculus who developed this technology, but that it was the veteran video game studio Zenimax.