Yesterday, Facebook bought Oculus VR, the scrappy virtual reality pioneer. Oculus went from a $2.4 million Kickstarter in 2012 to single-handedly bringing VR from a bad ’90s novelty to an imminent gaming reality. The immediate reaction was, to say the least, negative. My Twitter stream filled up with a there-was-an-earthquake-in-SF sized flood of howls of no. Even the top comments on Zuckerberg’s announcement on Facebook itself are, as I write this, full of bitter disappointed snark like this and this and this or, simply, this.¹

Notch (Markus Persson), the creator of Minecraft, and one of the pillars of the indie gaming community, reacted quickly on twitter by canceling his deal with the VR company, saying, “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.” He later expanded his reasoning on his own site. The nut is this (emphasis is his own):

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

Max Temkin, indie game magnate in his own right, and one of the minds behind Cards Against Humanity, most closely matched my own feelings on hearing the news with his post on the subject: “I join a lot of the people on Twitter who feel that this acquisition was somehow kind of sad, which is a curious emotion to feel about a social network buying a hardware startup.” He goes on:

If I had to hazard a guess, here’s what’s sad about it: Oculus was this big, open question in gaming. Just this weekend I was on Giant Bomb with Phil Fish and Zoe Quinn, and we were speculating wildly about the ways that the Rift would allow us to explore new worlds, understand body dysmorphia, and have computer sex. We hoped that Oculus could show us what was next for an art form that we love. And they did, and it sucked: Oculus will be a hobby project owned by an advertising company, used some day to collect personal information from “users” which will be sold to the highest bidder.

(For the curious, the segment he references is recorded here with the VR discussion starting at about 42 minutes in. Fair warning: includes drinking of Buckfast, swearing, discussion of teledildonics, acid, and synesthesia, before descending into a discussion of the downfall of society.)

To be sure, not all reactions were bad. Will Smith of Tested writes that Facebook buying Oculus VR is probably a good thing. In short, he points out that as Oculus had already taken on venture capital funding, this acquisition may shelter them from many threats: “As a VC-funded company, Oculus was walking a tightrope. A major mistake, one botched product release, one VC who wanted a quicker return on his investment, or even one story about VR addiction on the Today show could erase everything Oculus had built.”

With a little time to simmer down on the subject, I’ve wound up somewhere in between. I don’t trust Facebook. I can’t say I even like Facebook. Where Facebook has intersected with games, I’ve actively disliked it. So the addition of Facebook takes a little of the shine off Oculus. But the addition of Oculus might make Facebook a slightly more interesting place.

One thing that has always been interesting about Facebook is that unlike most technology startups of the last couple decades, Oculus included, they seemed determined from the beginning not to become a product to be acquired or folded into a bigger fish. They wanted to become a company. With their recent acquisitions, it’s clear they want to become a conglomerate. Something more like Disney, perhaps, even than like Google. So perhaps it’s as wrong to view this as the merger of Oculus into Facebook the product as it would be to think of Joss Whedon as making films for that animation studio that makes the Mickey Mouse cartoons.

But regardless of the practical considerations, even with the most optimistic lens, it still left me agreeing with Max Temkin from above. It makes me sad. And, yes, it is interesting to wonder why that is my reaction. His is a very good analysis of the specifics of this case, but for me, anyway, I think there’s something more general going on. I get this same kind of feeling to varying degrees whenever I see an indie startup gobbled by something bigger.

In part, I think, it’s because it represents a little death of some fraction of the indie dream. When we get invested in an independent company or artist, it’s easy—at least for those of us with creative ambitions, ourselves—to get swept up in not only the product, but the story. A small group of bright, enthusiastic, talented people bands together and makes something, not as a bullet point on some quarterly investor call, but because they believe in it. And they succeed, doing well enough to keep doing it. Well enough to live well. It’s an aspirational dream. Even if they take on funding, as long as they retain control, the idea of a group like that making the thing can be as exciting as the thing itself.

I had a little of this disappointment when Whiskey Media dissolved in 2012 and Giant Bomb moved to CBS Interactive. It was easy to imagine them in their old basement as this clubhouse of creative, opinionated people making crazy things and talking to people who make crazy things. It seemed like a nice dream to have a group of websites founded on the idea of strong editorial voice, standing against corrosive CPM advertising. It seemed like being bought by a wealthy conglomerate was the admission that the dream was over.

As it turns out (as evidenced by the totally not-approved-by-corporate tenor of the video linked above) they’ve kept their spirit pretty well so far. But it was still a shock to go from seeing videos shot in a brick basement with their own bar to a cube farm in an office tower. I can’t come up with a much better way to describe the feeling of an indie being bought out than that. The trouble is that indie dream is just that. It’s an idea. When I imagine the clubhouse in the basement, I don’t have to work out the financial realities. Or live with the apparently terrible, illness-inducing mold in the air. Staying as they were wasn’t an option, so it isn’t fair to represent the two paths as some sort of choice. What is sad, ultimately, is having to face up to the fact that it couldn’t work. That isn’t to say indies can’t thrive or that all indies who sell to bigger companies would have died otherwise. But the reality is that in many of these cases, the dream of that independent group of people making great new things without corporate overlords was only a dream. And whatever the particular reasons behind that this time, no matter how good they are, that realization sucks. And it’s sad. And it’s worth mourning.