IT industry: Some not doing business with company because it raised money for Donald Trump

IT industry: Some not doing business with company because it raised money for Donald Trump, by Emanuel Maiberg.

Several virtual reality game developers have announced that they will stop supporting Facebook’s Oculus Rift VR headset until its founder Palmer Luckey steps down.

Developers announced that they will stop supporting the Oculus Rift after The Daily Beast revealed that Luckey raised money for a pro-Donald Trump non-profit through a convoluted Reddit scheme. As Motherboard reported on Friday, Luckey’s Twitter activity has been sympathetic to the alt-right and the bigotry that defines it since March of this year.

Oculus Rift @ Gamescom 2014

Their reasons:

“Insomniac Games condemns all forms of hate speech,” Insomniac Games, makers of big-budget console games like Ratchet & Clank and one of the biggest developers making games for Oculus, told Motherboard. “While everyone has a right to express his or her political opinion, the behavior and sentiments reported do not reflect the values of our company. We are also confident that this behavior and sentiment does not reflect the values of the many Oculus employees we work with on a daily basis.”

“In a political climate as fragile and horrifying as this one, we cannot tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform,” Fez and Superhypercube developer Polytron said in a statement.

In other words: “We don’t like your politics, so we refuse to do business with you.” Hollywood is also notorious for “PC or the highway” practices. Usually the desire for profits eventually overcomes this sort of nonsense, but PC is running so hot at the moment it might take a while.

hat-tip Matthew