Oculus Co-Founder Scandal Prompts Flood Of Silicon Valley Donations To Hillary Clinton

In the wake of the scandal involving Palmer Luckey’s support of an anti-Hillary website, the “Oculus Rift” inventor has been the target of criticisms and even caused a boycott of the company’s product. Now, developers are even moving to donate directly to the Hillary Clinton campaign as a means to spite Luckey.

The news was first broken by The Daily Beast last Friday when it was discovered that Luckey invested $10,000 on a site called Nimble America. The site has been creating nasty memes against Clinton in support of Donald Trump.

On the same day, some developers announced that they would no longer make games for the Oculus Rift and some consumers even joined the growing movement to boycott the product. Shortly after that, noted VR figures including Edward “E” McNeill started contributing to Clinton’s presidential run.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, McNeill said that he gave $1,000 to the campaign. He added that he hopes the contribution would also spur other developers to do the same.

“I think that Palmer has the right to spend his money as he sees fit. And so do I,” he said. “If he’s going to put his VR money toward supporting Trump, then I’ll put my VR money toward supporting Clinton. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

Logan Olson, the developer of the VR sound creator SoundStage also joined in. Last Friday, Olson announced via Twitter that all profits from the title in a period of 24 hours will go to the Clinton campaign.

At this point, many of the protesting developers are insisting that they would only return to making games for the Rift if Luckey is removed from Oculus. Considering that Luckey is the inventor of the VR headset, this demand might understandably be difficult to fulfill. Under the combined weight of some heavy names like Insomniac Games, however, Oculus might have no choice but to give in.