Facebook mulled multi-billion-dollar acquisition of gaming giant Unity, book claims

From techcrunch.com

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Less than a year after making a $3 billion investment into the future of virtual reality with the purchase of Oculus VR, Facebook  CEO Mark Zuckerberg was considering another multi-billion-dollar bet to ensure that his company dominated the VR platform, buying Unity, the popular game engine that’s used to build half of all gaming titles.

This claim is made in a new book coming out next week, “The History of the Future,” by Blake Harris, which digs deep into the founding story of Oculus and the drama surrounding the Facebook acquisition, subsequent lawsuits, and personal politics of founder Palmer Luckey.

In the early days while he was writing the book, Harris worked closely with the Facebook PR team and was granted regular interviews with key execs before, as he puts it, his “access came to an end.” Harris claims that through reporting out the book, he had gained access to more than 25,000 documents from sources, including a nearly 2,500-word email sent by Mark Zuckerberg  to then-Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, Sheryl Sandberg and a half-dozen other Facebook leaders detailing his interest in buying Unity. TechCrunch has not independently verified the contents of the email.

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