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Sometimes, the best way to alienate a little company’s early backers is a big payday.

Tuesday afternoon, Facebook unexpectedly announced that it planned to purchase Oculus VR, the maker of a virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift, for $2 billion.

Reaction to the deal ranged from excitement (including on Wall Street) to bewilderment — and no, as some were wondering, it was not an early April Fools Day prank.

But a notably negative reaction came from those who backed the company when it was a fledgling idea for a hardware company looking to raise a few thousand bucks on a crowdfunding service called Kickstarter.

What was the point of the Kickstarter campaign, “if you sell out to a giant company like Facebook?” wrote a user named Mike Cooper on the company’s original fund-raising website a few moments after the news broke. “This is very disappointing. I will no longer be supporting the Oculus Rift in any way.”

Oculus VR has largely focused its efforts on building hardware for interactive and immersive 3-D games. But Facebook said on Tuesday that it “plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas.”

Many of those who were upset were developers who bought early prototypes of the Oculus Rift in the hope of being among the first to build games and entertainment experiences. They took to Twitter, Reddit and, ironically, Facebook to discuss their concerns over making products for a company that primarily makes money by targeting advertisements to those who use its services.

“I have no idea how to make sense of this at this point,” wrote a user named Richard Bettridge on the Oculus VR company website, where the announcement was posted. “I have no doubt no matter what this means, for sure they will use highly sophisticated metadata collection of users for profit.”

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Although the Oculus Rift concept did get its initial lift and funding on Kickstarter, it wasn’t long after its initial release that the company began raising large sums of money from venture capitalists.

Before it was acquired, the company raised more than $90 million from an impressive roster of investors. But early backers did not sour on Oculus VR until the company announced the Facebook deal.

Like loyal Instagram and WhatsApp fans before them, many were displeased to learn Oculus was landing in the ad-driven world of Facebook.

But the humble origins of the Oculus and the anger that its sale has provoked online provides a particular kind of insight into some of the challenges of the crowdfunding model through services like Kickstarter.

The armchair philanthropists who open their wallets to give $10 or $100 to a nascent idea and company have high expectations for those projects and where they end up. That is difficult for project creators to anticipate, and hard for those who come along later to grasp.