If you wondered why yesterday’s news stirred such a significant reaction from the VR community at large, it’s not just because Facebook doesn’t have a stellar reputation on privacy, it’s also because the company specifically promised it wouldn’t force users to log-in with a Facebook account to use their Oculus headset.

Let’s set the stage with a quick refresher on Oculus’ history. As an entirely unknown startup, the company had a blowout Kickstarter success in 2012 when it raised $2.4 million for a VR headset development kit, the Rift DK1. Alongside gaining the attention and favor of key companies like Valve and veteran engineers like John Carmack and Michael Abrash, the company managed to rapidly raise a string of investments from high profile VC firms; a Series A round of $16 million in early 2013 followed by a Series B round of $75 million in late 2013.

The quickly rising startup caught the eye of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who came to believe that VR and AR would be the next major shift in computing, and an avenue to get out from under the thumb of tech giants like Apple and Google. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for a whopping $2 billion.

At the time, Facebook was the last company anyone would have expected to buy Oculus. Our headline here on Road to VR at the time encapsulates that surprise: “Not an Early April Fools Prank: Facebook Acquires Oculus VR Inc for $2 Billion.”

Even ardent supporters of the company were immediately skeptical that Facebook’s business model could rot the foundation of Oculus’ VR ambitions with invasive user-tracking and ad serving.

To assuage such fears, Facebook, on behalf of Oculus’ founder, Palmer Luckey, promised in no uncertain terms that users would never be required to log-in with Facebook to Oculus headsets, nor would developers need to do so to develop content for those headsets.

It was the day of the announcement of Oculus’ acquisition that Luckey took to the Oculus community on Reddit to offer explanations to angry supporters. “I guarantee that you won’t need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift,” he said in response to a Redditor asking if he could at least promise that much.

Yesterday the company demolished that promise when it announced that it would begin requiring all new users of Oculus headsets to log-in with a Facebook account starting in October, and that existing users would also be required to log-in by the end of 2022 if they wanted to retain full use of their headsets.

Although Luckey—which was later pushed out of Facebook because of his personal political views—was the one that made the promise, he wasn’t acting on his own. Luckey had long been a visible spokesperson for the company; the promise wasn’t his, it was that of Oculus and Facebook.

Following Facebook’s announcement this week, Luckey confirmed as much, saying that his guarantee had been “approved” by Facebook.

“I want to make clear that those promises were approved by Facebook in that moment and on an ongoing basis, and I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons.”

Although Luckey believed at the time that Facebook would allow Oculus to operate largely independently, it wasn’t long after Luckey was pushed out of Facebook in 2017 that other core Oculus founders began to leave. By then Oculus had already begun to erode Oculus’ autonomy, but by the time the final founder left in 2019, Oculus was being run by Facebook appointed executives and had effectively become just another team within the larger company.

And if there was any question if that was the case, this week’s news—that the company would simply disregard promises it had made about requiring a Facebook log-in to use Oculus products—is surely the period on the last page of the Oculus acquisition story.

– – — – –

It certainly makes us wonder… what good is any promise now from Facebook about where it will draw the line between what it thinks is right for Facebook users and what’s right for Oculus users?

Back at the start of the acquisition story, Luckey—and by extension, Oculus and Facebook—had made another promise too. “We are not going to track you, flash ads at you, or do anything invasive.”

But by now Facebook has already confirmed that it tracks the activity of Oculus users to inform advertising shown to those users outside of the headset.

Will Oculus headsets “flash ads at you” in the future? This week Facebook answered that question in an unabashedly non-committal way (perhaps because it has realized that people actually expect it to keep promises that it makes): “We do not currently display ads in Oculus devices.”

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Ryan McClelland

    Props to Palmer for his Reddit post.

    • You mean his cash-fueled LIES?

      • ViRGiN

        I’m glad someone is going out of his way to correct the spread of new misinformation. Kudos.

      • Ian Shook

        I understand your viewpoint, but they way in which your write is sort of “crazy person” and it takes away from your message. It doesn’t seem like a calm collected person making good points, it’s more like a raving lunatic with red string connecting images in his bedroom wearing tinfoil. I guess all I’m suggesting is to not seem crazy.

        • Maybe I am a crazy person. Who the fuck are you to say anything about it? Insanity and dishonesty are not mutually exclusive.

          • Ian Shook

            I’m nobody. And I didn’t comment on the validity of your claims. I’m just saying your comments seem nutty based on structure alone.

          • Well, thanks for your diagnosis, DOC, but I’ll just keep on keepin’ on, thank you very much.

          • Thanks for your diagnosis, doc. How ’bout you go armchair-mindrape some other schmuck.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Who says? At the time he said it, it was true. Maybe if he was still running Oculus it would still be true, but it also might not.. 6 years since he made that announcement and still 2 years left, is 8 years, that a long VERY LONG time in the tech business..

  • alboradasa

    Here’s a promise that will actually be kept:
    I will never buy another Oculus product ever again.

    • Khagrin

      Second that

    • Andrew Jakobs

      How can you be so sure? What if Oculus would release a 4K per eye headset with the best displays with eyetracking, best comfort, best audio, best inside out tracking including tracking of controllers behind your back, and excellent controllers, and all for a very low price which no competitor is able to do for a very long time… I know that a lot of people bitching here not wanting Oculus headsets will be the ones first in line to buy an Oculus headset..

      • alboradasa

        Honestly, I’d pass. Or spend more money on an alternative. Now that Oculus and Facebook have fully merged, the idea of one of their devices with eye-tracking is like some kind of Orwellian nightmare.

        • Matt

          Me too. Would never give facebook a penny no matter what they’re offering, awful company. I can’t believe there’s so many idiots that are doing. Get a Valve Index (which is far superior anyway) or an HTC, if you can’t afford one well VR is still in its infancy anyway, you’re not missing out that much, just wait until a decent affordable competitor comes along.

      • Ad

        They make cheap mass market headsets, but even if they didn’t we would go for the competition or step away from VR. We actually care about VR, not about Facebook.

        • Alan Harrington

          We care about VR so would step away from VR? You make no sense at all. What you mean is you hate Facebook so much that you would cut your nose off to spite your face.

          • Ad

            I love VR, so I want VR to succeed as a free, open, and vibrant platform. It being entirely under one company’s control is the opposite of that. It’s like saying you love someone so much that you would hold them prisoner. In that case, if you love them you would let them go.

          • AJ_74

            It’s not under one company’s control. HTC makes headsets. Valve makes a headset. HP makes headsets. There are also competing platforms. SteamVR. VivePort. Facebook’s intentions were clear from the outset; They were building a platform, hence Oculus Home/Marketplace. It’s always been a walled-off garden, and only logging in with your Oculus account doesn’t change that equation one bit.

          • Munchy

            makes sence to me. they love or care about vr and dont feel facebook is a good match and that match is something they arent willing to participate in. they care about vr so they are likely, very likely to look at other none oculas, facebook vr alternatives. again thats becasue they carew about vr. makes alot of sence to me as i agree with them.

          • Femina Street

            I left Crapbook a long time back when the tracking of users came to light. It isn’t cutting off of noses unlike FB creepers say, it is stopping Fuckerburke making an idiot of you like he seems to e doing with his loyal face suckers.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Yes, and it’s actually my interest in VR that would still get me to buy a Facebook headset if their headset is the best for its price. And as a developer if they have a large userbase I would still support their platform as I’m not a moron who would stiffle my own business because something stupid like that.

          • Ad

            Until they make a competing product to your own and kill you off.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            But isn’t that with all VR-platforms? They don’t kill me off, I still can sell my game in their store.. And since it’s a game the chances is very slim for them to create a competing product.. I agree with you in regard to something like RemoteDesk, but I think that shouldn’t even be a 3rd party app anyway, that’s something I expect now from a new wireless headset..

          • Ad

            Honestly, if they make a similar game for free in Horizons, you’re dead. Or if they make a similar game through one of their in house studios and sell it for half the price in constant sales to attract more customers. Not to mention they will have F2P games for sure both on horizon and off.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            But that’s a risk you always run into with any game you create, there is always a possibility a bigger company will create something similar.. But it will always take a while before they can create/release the look-a-like..
            So I don’t really see the problem..

          • Ad

            It’s an issue since you’re on their platform at the same time. Valve put out just Alyx, and it isn’t free. What is your game?

          • Andrew Jakobs

            yeah, Oculus also released some games on their own platform which aren’t free.. So what’s your point?

          • Ad

            My point was that you said every platform does this, which isn’t accurate, compared to many devs saying this is happening with facebook.

          • marque2

            Go for it but my personal choice is not to have my data, or my kids data taken by Facebook. We have seen how they treat people who aren’t Facebook woke, and I certainly don’t want them monitoring my activities. If you enjoy having Zuckerberg watch you and possibly control you in the future – fantastic for you. You are Zuckerberg now.

      • Martin

        The point is to stand up for privacy and send a message to the intimacy invading tech companies that we don’t want them in our lives.

        This whole facebook/oculus thing, since day one, has ALWAYS been about facebook’s orwellian behaviour, action, and disregard towards humans.

        We either stand for what’s right, or we don’t. Cambridge Analiytica scandal, newsfeed manipulation that affected millions emotional state, the founder saying he doesn’t give a crap about people’s privacy, the dragging of this juggernaut before congress and the lack of any change by that very same panel, because the panel, as a governmental body, ALSO wants all your private information to sell to their well connected friends.

        This has to stop. It isn’t right. THAT’S what this is about. It’s NOT about developer delight or cutting edge tech desire.

        This is MY life, and it’s no one’s business but my own and those I CHOOSE to share it with, not someone I give it away to, through not understanding wholistically, the extent to which an end user agreement tricks me with legalese and carefully worded jargon.

        You will say “It’s your responsibility to read that user agreement and can opt out if you don’t like it. That’s on you.”

        To which I say…that’s the point. I have no other option than to give up everything about my life in order to even have the VR experience, including in the near future, everything I’m looking at, in addition to my words spoken, messages sent, private conversations, social behaviour, habits, sexual identity and preference, political views, religious beliefs, daily actions, locations and mindset.

        That is none of your business, and should NOT be a requirement to play some games on a computer device.

        THIS is what the others on this forum mean when they say they are willing to walk away from VR if facebook does this kind of thing.

        They are holding ALL the cards. Your WHOLE life, and now coming soon to a VR headset, all your biometric data.

        Developers are the “entertainment distraction” element in the equation that serves the underlying purpose of monetization by creation of the ‘blissful ignorance’ needed to shift the awareness away from the fact that all this is, is a way to collect personal information for a handful of tech companies who profit from it, up to and including, selling it to law enforcement, foreign governments, and corporations that will attempt to hijack your psyche to sell you something the planet can’t even afford to sustain selling in the long term anyway.

        There’s so much more at stake here. Now, you’re either aware of this, or you just don’t care.

        I’m sorry, but I felt this needed to be said, because its not being said enough in a way that people can grasp and take action against.

        Get off Facebook and all social media, and walk away from any company that requires your life in exchange. The precedent being set is not good for you, but it’s going to be a living nightmare for your children. Stop and think. Please?

      • Martin

        The point is to stand up for privacy and send a message to the intimacy invading tech companies that we don’t want them in our lives.

        This whole facebook/oculus thing, since day one, has ALWAYS been about facebook’s orwellian behaviour, action, and disregard towards humans.

        We either stand for what’s right, or we don’t. Cambridge Analiytica scandal, newsfeed manipulation that affected millions emotional state, the founder saying he doesn’t give a crap about people’s privacy, the dragging of this juggernaut before congress and the lack of any change by that very same panel, because the panel, as a governmental body, ALSO wants all your private information to sell to their well connected friends.

        This has to stop. It isn’t right. THAT’S what this is about. It’s NOT about developer delight or cutting edge tech desire.

        This is MY life, and it’s no one’s business but my own and those I CHOOSE to share it with, not someone I give it away to, through not understanding wholistically, the extent to which an end user agreement tricks me with legalese and carefully worded jargon.

        You will say “It’s your responsibility to read that user agreement and can opt out if you don’t like it. That’s on you.”

        To which I say…that’s the point. I have no other option than to give up everything about my life in order to even have the VR experience, including in the near future, everything I’m looking at, in addition to my words spoken, messages sent, private conversations, social behaviour, habits, sexual identity and preference, political views, religious beliefs, daily actions, locations and mindset.

        That is none of your business, and should NOT be a requirement to play some games on a computer device.

        THIS is what the others on this forum mean when they say they are willing to walk away from VR if facebook does this kind of thing.

        They are holding ALL the cards. Your WHOLE life, and now coming soon to a VR headset, all your biometric data.

        Developers are the “entertainment distraction” element in the equation that serves the underlying purpose of monetization by creation of the ‘blissful ignorance’ needed to shift the awareness away from the fact that all this is, is a way to collect personal information for a handful of tech companies who profit from it, up to and including, selling it to law enforcement, foreign governments, and corporations that will attempt to hijack your psyche to sell you something the planet can’t even afford to sustain selling in the long term anyway.

        There’s so much more at stake here. Now, you’re either aware of this, or you just don’t care.

        I’m sorry, but I felt this needed to be said, because its not being said enough in a way that people can grasp and take action against.

        Get off Facebook and all social media, and walk away from any company that requires your life in exchange. The precedent being set is not good for you, but it’s going to be a living nightmare for your children. Stop and think. Please?

      • johann jensson

        I doubt that. Oculus was interested in high end VR, but Facebook is only interested in VR for the masses – that’s spelled CHEAP. []-)

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Actually you’re wrong there, it was Oculus that wanted to bring VR to the masses for affordable prices. It was Luckey’s mission to release a headset for around $400..

          • johann jensson

            Ah, well, i was talking after they got aquired by FB. Why do you think the important Oculus guys started to leave? “Race to the bottom”, they called it…

      • marcandrdsilets

        @andrewjakobs:disqus : Don’t Try to Reason With Unreasonable People. It’s always the same people, saying the same thing over and over again. Most of them are anti-facebook and while they are saying that they will sell ALL their oculus headsets, I’m pretty sure most of them don’t even have one. Hater’s gonna hate. As a VR developer, I think exactly like you do. Don’t waste too much time answering people’s comment here it’s a never ending story. This community is so toxic now that it is impossible to have a discussion about vr in comments, we’re lost in all the trash talk.

        • NotAnOnlineRageNub

          Says the unreasonable person who dismisses genuine concerns as “toxic”.

        • marque2

          I don’t have one yet but was looking for Christmas for my kids. I quit Facebook several years ago and don’t want them getting my data, or my kids data, so I will have it look for another brand.

        • Matt

          Of course you can reason, but you’re right about haters going to hate, thing is though people hate facebook because of GOOD REASON.

          Yes plenty of people are anti-facebook but that doesn’t make them unreasonable, quite the opposite. It’s the sheep that won’t stand up to facebook that are the ones not listening to reason. If you’re going to sell out to an evil corporation you need a much better reason than a mediocre VR headset that will make your wallet £400 lighter!

          • marcandrdsilets

            Facebook or not to Facebook that is the questions. It’s your opinion and it’s alright, you are a grown up person and you can make your own decision and I’m you have good reasons for it.

            It’s also ok to judge it as a mediocre vr headset if you don’t like it. There’s a lot of other options available to you. I saw a lot of positive review about this headset and the spec sheet is pretty impressive for the price in my opinion. But if it’s not your cup of tea simply spend your money else where.

            Stay safe my friend!

      • Ken T

        So then you don’t mind the government of the UAE getting videos of your daughter rubbing off to porn as long as you save $50 on a VR headset?

        Ok. Cool. That is you.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          uh? how is Facebook related to ‘videos of my daughter rubbing off to porn’ and especially government of the UAE… Please get your head out of your ass and be realistic… If I even had a daughter how is my daughter rubbing off to porn related to my FB account, because there is a bigger issue if you, as a father, have a video of your daughter rubbing off to porn (on your FB account).

          • Ken T

            Oh so facebook doesn’t sell the data they collect on young girls to foreign governments?

            Oh. Ok. Sure.

          • JustAWordInTheWind

            There are multiple cameras on a facebook hmd, they are also able to tell exactly what video/audio is being processed through the device. There is also an in-built mic in all of the headsets.

            Pray tell caring father, if her device was to be connected to a vulnerable network and I was a malicious hacker trying to blackmail your daughter whats to stop me from using all of those censors and recording video/audio of her masturbating?

            Exactly, there isn’t anything, now imagine you own the device and don’t even need to bother hacking the device to gain access to its censors and such. The point is you put far to much faith in Facebook.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Ahh, so she also doesn’t have a smartphone, no laptop/computer with (built in) camera/microphone or any other ‘smart’device with a camera/microphone.. Don’t know about you, but most people just turn their headset off, otherwise the battery will drain, and off IS off with the Quest.. And with most PC headsets most will also turn it off, at least I always do that as I don’t want it to drain power when I’m not using it..

          • Munchy

            truth is it doesnt mater if you want facebook on your vr thats your choice. i dont want a facebook acount and as such i chose to not buy a oculas quest 2, i want one but im not willing to buty a headset unless i dont have to log onto facebook./ facebook is fast becomeing the past, my issues is not piracy. my issues are its gone from a comunication social tool to a advertisment bonanza, a place where people in your nbeibourhood by cheap 50p items on ebay and then sell them to your 60 year old mother for 10 pounds. It a terrible platform because your inundated with quizz games you dont want to play, games with monitisation you dont want to play and well its gone from a clean great app to one big sloppy mess. Thats why i dont want a facebook acount and thats why i wont get a oculas even if id love one. Google have all my info so its not for that reason but i can imagine facebook accidently banning lots of people because they talk abvout sex or watch porn or manybe they go on a game that has too much horror in it and somehow you get baned. i simply dont trust facebook. i trust mark zuckerberg as i first started using shutters on my web cams years ago after seeing him on a computer in his offisce with a shutter on his cameras. lol.

      • Shaun White

        TOS Bannable offense “Bad Behavior” that is open ended and considering current social media track record “Bad Behavior” could mean different opinion of the main stream. I cant even make an account based on TOS with out sending them a copy of my ID, there was a time things like Facebook were a place to go to get away and sometimes be someone else. Now a day’s the easily offended change the rules, the term Troll is misused by the media and now the online world is becoming a 1 to 1 extension of the real world.

        Think about ad’s on YouTube, mid video you are forced to watch a few seconds to a min of ad though you can skip most majority of the ad most of the time. You can remove ad’s by paying for a youtube red account, when will facebook do that? when will we be mid game and then forced to run into ad’s or pay for another account.

        When we moved away from cable and tried to make everything wireless we slowly started packing on multiple streaming services, the idea of savings went away in just a few years and we now spend more most often.

        My issue with your statements is you simply disregard the feelings of parts of the community. The fact is Facebook did, does and will continue to gather meta data and benefit from it. Honestly I didn’t blame them in the beginning, they needed revenue. That’s not the case anymore, hard core PC enthusiast like my self have slowly found more ways to simply live off the grid in relation to social media and tech conglomerates. It feels good to many people when you know you have some privacy, especially in today’s tech drive environment.

        Be more understanding of what the real concern is, many people lash out with ad hominems in their frustration. Ignore them and do your best to develop fun games but I believe you don’t think peoples concerns are invalid, at least i hope not.

      • Mike

        I say Not Me! I no longer use facebook because of their way of invading your privacy, plus!
        So I no longer look at anything they are involved with because I love my privacy! I will pay more to not be in any ones ability to use me.

      • Munchy

        id love a oculas 2quest 2 but not at the cost of having to log into facebook. not happening.

      • Chris Sparling

        i don’t care about any of that, if i have to have an account to use the quest 2. in this day and age when one wrong word could get you banned out right, you would need to make a new account and buy all new games again, that my friend is wrong on so many levels.

        if facebook is willing to leave the leftist woke crap out of my games, and guarantee my political views won’t get me banned, then maybe. but that is not a risk i am willing to put on my wallet.

    • crim3

      It’s funny, because there is a Spanish saying about this: never say “I won’t drink from this water.” :D

      • alboradasa

        Sure, but what if the water is contaminated with toxic waste? :)

        • Seadna Smallwood

          A lot of people have no choice but to drink contaminated water.

          • johann jensson

            Your example falls flat, because in VR now we have choice, we have alternatives – nobody has to use Facebook. And sorry, but i have no sympathy for console lovers (Quest buyers), they just damage the industry with their behavior.

          • Seadna Smallwood

            The alternative (Vive focus) is too expensive and not good enough.

          • marque2

            I am looking and don’t see that many choices for a PC out there. There are some pseudo ons from Microsoft and a $1000 one from Valve.

    • Gerald Terveen

      do you mean because the next generation or future generations will be Facebook branded or does it include Facebook branded XR hardware as well?

    • Matt

      I almost bought an Oculus many months ago before they were acquired by Facebook. Decided to postpone it at the time… so glad I did! Definitely not buying one now.

  • wheeler

    What baffles is that there are people that are any more outraged about this now than they were during the Facebook acquisition of Oculus. This should have been *obvious*. I know many of these people (developers, hackers, enthusiasts) are quite knowledgeable, at least, when it comes to technical matters, but that clearly has no bearing on their understanding of the behavior of corporations.

    Their fucking business model is to monitor your behavior in the most personal way possible (linking it to your real identity) thereby making you vulnerable to targeted influence, and then coordinate that influence (through 3rd parties or directly). It doesn’t take a genius to understand how this ties into their interest in VR and AR. And people seriously thought a few reddit posts by the eccentric founder of the acquired company would prevent this mega corp from acting on that interest in the most obvious way possible?

    • alboradasa

      Maybe because that acquisition came with promises that Oculus would be left to operate as a semi independent company? That the policies and business models of Facebook and Oculus would remain separate? That Oculus products would not carry the Facebook branding?
      Maybe it was naive to think they would keep these promises but they were promises nonetheless. They purposely misled people into thinking these things so it’s a bit shitty to turn the blame onto the stupidity of the customers.

      • No, Palmer SAID they promised these things. Believing them was his first mistake. Anyone who believed anything different is/was being willfully ignorant, C’mon, it’s fucking FACEBOOK. We all know what they are like.

        • alboradasa

          This was pre Cambridge Analytica and various other scandals that brought their practices to light, so no, we didn’t all know what they were like. At least not fully, and not enough to think that public statements they were making were 100% false.

          • Really? You mean you couldn’t tell they were shady from all their previous shadiness until the media announced to you that they were shady? Jesus fucking wept. FB has been blatantly and publicly shady for FUCKING YEARS.

          • alboradasa

            There’s a difference between being “shady” and telling outright lies as a corporation, which in 2014 there wasn’t much evidence of them doing. But why I am trying to argue with you, you’re clearly incapable of reasonable discussion without resorting shouting and insults.

      • wheeler

        Yes, I think it was naive to trust them and I absolutely expect consumers (especially developers, hackers and enthusiasts) to be less gullible than this. And it was surely a very *convenient* gullibility because we get lots of new shiney and hypey (and much faster than it would have happened otherwise) as a result of this.

        It’s a couple of reddit comments vs the explicit multi-billion dollar business model of a megacorp. Even if these comments were in a contract or legally binding in some other way, I’d be looking for a million ways that FB could use to weasel out of them.

        • alboradasa

          I think it’s easy to say all this in hindsight but you have to remember the spirit of innovation and the wave of grass-roots enthusiasm that came in the early days of Oculus- Palmer seemed to be a person who was genuinely interested in the viability of VR for its own sake and it was hard to believe that he would be willing to sell out so easily without certain rigid conditions in place. It soon became very clear that he is fact an utter piece of shit garbage excuse for a human being who would happily sell his own children to another sociopath. But I don’t think it was completely naive and gullible to think that maybe that wasn’t the case at the time.
          Don’t get me wrong, at the time I was super skeptical and dismayed by the deal, but I don’t blame others for wanting to believe that Oculus might have remained relatively independent, at least for a few more years than it did.

          • ViRGiN

            Palmer pushed “games has to be built from ground up for VR” for years – look where we are now in 2020. The software is still mostly indie crap, with few gems here and there. The best games are actual old games ports, like on Quest – Half Life, Quake, tonights RTCW…

    • Andrew Jakobs

      But remember, without Facebook, the DK2 (with some minor improvements) was actually in line to become the CV1…. That would have been utter crap.. All other models where only after Facebook bought it.

      • Rogue Transfer

        According to Palmer, all the design decisions about how the CV1 would be, were done before Facebook research and development had anything to do with Oculus headsets. In fact, he said that the fruit of that Facebook R&D would only be seen in headsets after the Rift CV1(e.g. the Go, Quest and Rift S).

        • Classi Fied

          Even then, the Rift S was a collaboration with Lenovo- not exclusively Facebook.

          Up until this point, I loved my Quest, and I’m seriously considering what I’m going to do about this news…

    • Ad

      Sure but we can’t change the past, we need to beat facebook now. There are still people trying to see “both sides” of this.

    • Exactly this. I’m angry of what is happening, but I saw that coming many months ago, it was obvious

      • Przemo-c

        Yup. Moving party system to rely entirely on facebook login and not wavering on that point was a very clear sign. And we all knew it would happen sooner or later but i was hoping they wouldn’t break stuff for users already in…

    • Kyle Clerico

      It’s the same outrage. Oculus calmed people down during the acquistion with this promise of them not being a facebook thing. They’re now reneging on that, so the outrage that was calmed is suddenly boiling over… and it’s worse now because people feel tricked. There are definitely people out there that would not have bought oculus if they knew this would happen and only did because they were explicitly promised that it would not. My interest in the quest evaporated with this news… not for technical reasons, but for trust reasons.

  • Let’s all face the truth here. We were told FB would never require a FB account for Oculus by Palmer Luckey. PALMER FUCKING LIED TO US. He counted his billions and said “Yeah, I can bullshit them.” and then he went to the bank and LAUGHED.

    • alboradasa

      Maybe you missed it but Palmer was the head of Oculus at the time. When the head of a company makes a statement about that company, people tend to listen

      • He was head of A DEPARTMENT that was WHOLLY and COMPLETELY controlled by Facebook. Zuckerdroid was up on high, laughing while his little insignificant piece of property made blustery promises. Palmer knew this. He was just trying to reassure the community while he was SUCKING IN CASH and throwing us all to the wolves.

        • Andres Velasco

          Palmer clearly tried protect the users while he was in control

          • No, he projected the IMAGE of a guy trying to protect the users. His actions have all said otherwise.

      • ViRGiN

        Maybe you missed it, but after being fired from Facebook he did promise everyone who applied a free CV1 Audio Kit.
        His words are worth NOTHING for years. He is essentially a weeb.

        • alboradasa

          That was more than 3 years afterwards. How were people supposed to know that at the time?

        • Andres Velasco

          Erm, it didnt happen because he was fired, use the brain, it is for something

        • Jonathan Winters III

          Yeah I contacted him TWICE for the kit. Never heard back from him.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Well, what he actually said is you wouldn’t need a Facebook account for the Oculus Rift….. and that’s true….

    • Andres Velasco

      How did Palmer Lied? Wasn’t Palmer fired, and therefore Facebook is to blame? I know that using the brain is difficult

  • Anyone who believed Palmer’s bullshit promises without hearing VERIFICATION from Facebook is an idiot. If you didn’t see this coming you are a FOOL.

    • Andres Velasco

      blah, blah

    • Zantetsu

      Everything you write is childish. Welcome to my blocklist.

  • dhorowitz

    I think it’s very lame that they did this, but isn’t the workaround of just creating a spam Facebook account an easy fix? If you are concerned about privacy, delete your real account, make a fake one and don’t put any personal information on the net.

    • wheeler

      FB now actively looks for unverified accounts that look suspicious. E.g. I have helped several friends and family members that have had their accounts suspended because they looked “suspicious” (even though they were just using them normally with their real info). What happens is that you need to verify your identity with e.g. a driver’s license. The driver’s license has to match your account information or your account stays deactivated. These people were very distraught because for some of them it meant they could no longer conduct a large part of their business. It could happen at any time and you’d presumably lose access to all of your games (and usage of your headset)

      • dhorowitz

        Thanks, I agree that is problematic. There’s only so far I will go for a workaround for this. The minute FB forces me to jump through too many hoops to make a fake account is the minute I will sell my Oculus and go another route. But FWIW I have had a spam FB account I use for work, and thus far it hasn’t been deactivated. That account has 0 friends, and no picture. I presume there will always be a way to trick FB, and hack your way to a fake account. I can tolerate a low effort workaround if I have to. Just as long as that effort is negligible.

        • Sven Viking

          The trouble is, there may always be ways to trick Facebook with fake accounts, but depending on how things are handled there may never be a way to regain your account or purchases if the trick is eventually discovered.

    • Ad

      There’s no such thing as a fake account. Facebook accounts aren’t about the information you put in, it’s about the info they collect from anything you do on their platform (including social VR) and from following you around the web, and collecting from people they can tell are connected to you. Even people who don’t have accounts are in their system through shadow profiles. Also, if you use the account in VR, then how is it not a real account?

      • dhorowitz

        good points, but I would suggest that Oculus tracked those things from the beginning. the only difference this new scenario is that a facebook account is involved. So my oculus account is currently what will eventually become the facebook account used with the headset. both involve tracking and collecting data about use.

        • Ad

          So the terms of use and privacy agreements are actually quite different, and this means that integration of facebook into VR and any other limitations on facebook’s invasiveness are coming off. So yes, it wasn’t safe before, but that in no way shape or form means that things won’t get worse. I see people saying that nothing has/will change, and that isn’t true at all.

  • ViRGiN

    How about covering the news of Palmer Free CV1 Audio Fix Kit scam? Over 1.5 year passed. Now RoadToVR is back to painting Palmer as good samaritian who only wanted the best for us.
    Screw Palmer.

  • Jim P

    A lot of people are eating there words today from last headline that Palmer was written on.

  • Alextended

    More bsticles instead of posting about all the awesome VR games news, “here’s where facebook guaranteed” says the liar’s title, oh wait, facebook never did, alt right liar Luckey did and now claims facebook gave him the okay knowing they aren’t even gonna bother commenting as nowadays he’s an insignificant individual only alt right liars care about.

    • Andres Velasco

      Is a good article and relevant. Maybe not for you. But many others find this critical. Luckey is a conservative, not alt right, learn your politics

      • ViRGiN

        Will you upvote Valve lies about 2nd gen lighthouses being cheaper? No you won’t you steam sell out.

        • Alextended

          I mean, he calls openly racist fucks “conservative” (nope, not every conservative is a pos like Luckey folks, if you are that’s on you) and says an article with blatant lies in its own blurb (“facebook guaranteed”) is a good article, you expected too much :)

  • Nothing to see here

    I am fine with this. Facebook will invest billions of dollars figuring out how to make a great VR headset and then will completely ruin the experience because they are Facebook. In the end some everyone will be using VR headsets from other companies boosted by the demand from Oculus customers fleeing the platform.

    • Ad

      The whole point of this is to make it hard to leave, and as Devs are telling it, that is absolutely possible.

  • Andres Velasco

    Just get a Index and use Revive!

    • Ad

      If you use Revive you would have to make a facebook account and give them access.

  • It’s the scene from Ready Player One where the guy says they’re found a way to use up like 80% of the screen space for ads without making users too sick, or something to that effect–it’s coming! :-o

    • Ad

      For so long people acted like Facebook wasn’t the evil company from that movie and I just couldn’t understand the blindness.

      • Well, Facebook has always been insidious, but I honestly thought Oculus might be able to evade its hand of influence for the most part. I always knew Facebook had the intention of using its VR headsets and Oculus platform as just one more arm of its “social” media [see using humans as capital for advertisers) platform and empire, but, since it already had an option allowing to sign in using normal email accounts, I figured that might stay the same and they’d just include the alternative option to sign into all the Facebook specific stuff. :(

        • Ad

          Oculus isn’t a real thing, it’s just a title. They work at a facebook campus, their research division is literally “Facebook Reality Labs,” and Zuckerberg was overseeing all this himself since it’s a project he sees as really key. Anton did an interview where he basically explains that Facebook sees this as making themselves independent of everyone else and having their own hardware, their own OS, and their platform where others pay them to be there.

          • Well that’s now, but Oculus was once a thing that wasn’t entirely just Facebook VR.

          • Ad

            They were largely folded in over the last few years, it was fairly quick after the purchase but people were still talking about them last year like they were different entities.

  • TechPassion

    Just buy Samsung Odyssey+ or HP Reverb G2 or Valve Index. Forget about Oculus crap

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Why forget about Oculus ‘crap’? if they have a fine headset and it brings enough business, I don’t see a big deal..Oh yeah, I need a facebook account to log in, oh dear oh dear… Certainly as a VR developer I wouldn’t ignore Oculus gear… It’s just business..

      • Patrick Hogenboom

        It’s business which has a toxic effect on society and which I do not want inside the most intimate device ever, collecting data on me.
        Sure they can offer the best hardware value for money, because they don’t make the bulk of their money off that hardware.
        Your personal data and the power it wields over society when applied to scale, that’s where the real money comes from.

      • Ultimaniacx4

        It’s scummy business. Future versions of quest are going to have eye tracking, constant global position monitoring, heart rate monitoring, etc.
        They’re going to be able to map the entire user’s being into a data set and sell ‘you’ to anyone and everyone.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Not really, at least not in the EU, most of what you speak of is biometric info, and those are under strict rules in the EU, you can’t sell those and in most cases you are not even allowed to store them, and if you are, not identifiable to a specific person.

          • SmartAss

            You remember what Facebook did once GDPR became a thing? Moved every piece of data collected in EU to Ireland (which is known to be more friendly to shady business practices) and most likely copied a lot of it to US for use. The whole Cambridge Analytica was probably just the tip of the iceberg what is going behind Facebook and since EU has taken their stand Facebook has become even paranoid about their security (even following where Facebook collected data ends up is hellish work currently).
            I would give it max. 10 years before Facebook is caught doing shady things with the inside-out tracking data. It is far too delicious fruit for Facebook not to try out and eat.

            On business side, I would be careful with Facebook. There lying huge PR catastrophe is the smaller worry. The bigger one is that they are more focusing on stand-alone and mobile HMDs with PC use as extra option. Them being part of OpenXR does give some stability but we all know what megacorporations do once they manage to get their own platform; Turn it into a walled garden dictated by themselves, and only one has been really successful in it and mostly because they are not profiled as datahoarders and manage to bring products that general population doesn’t find completely questionable. Not to mention that they are already kind of trying to do that by constantly breaking SteamVR support and having the only platform that supports only their products (Steam and Viveport both support everything, Oculus still officially supports only Oculus HW). But if they were to make the iPhone of VR and get a ton of users, yeah, I would support them but maybe but a bit sticks in the wheels with not that well optimizing things and putting some hardly noticeable pointers towards competitors and how my game/program works better on them.
            But I wouldn’t loose my night sleep over it. If people keep pointing out that Oculus=Facebook they really need to come up with unicorn product to get away with their current fame within general population. Think about Facebook resurrecting their M-project and coming up with smart speaker for it and how well people would take that, “people wouldn’t question it at all”.

          • Classi Fied

            Do you actually believe that Facebook doesn’t sell that information? Facebook doesn’t care about “leaking” PII. They’ve done it before, and they didn’t actually stop

          • austrian

            rules & laws (IF you have them in place, “privacy shield” framework has never been a good deal from € consumers point of views and is meanwhile dead/invalid anyway, needs to be renegotiated but I don’t expect much improvement.. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield) are one thing, getting a foreign tech giant with that much power (on any level), backed by the us gov, to apply is a whole different one.

  • MeowMix

    With the new FB requirement going forward, I have a sneaking suspicion this will lead to heavily subsidized headsets with tech features above and beyond what most of the existing competitors can offer.

    What if this Quest 2 is true hybrid headset (standalone + displayport input from your PC), with 4K displays offered at the insane pricepoint of $300 ? How many of us would say ‘No’ to that ?

    • silvaring

      Thats why I’m not getting outrage like all these other pussies on here. It’s a service agreement you make with a data company… don’t like them using your data, then don’t fucking use the service like a personal scrap book with all your most intimate secrets. The rest of us, we will use it just like we’ve always used Facebook, to connect with people who would otherwise be very difficult to find. And until another data company offers a better alternative Facebook will remain the standard.

      • Ad

        Look up how facebook data collection actually works.

        • silvaring

          Data collection? What do you mean, how they log our inputted data or how they track our existing data and connections? Because there’s a huge difference between those two functions.

    • Ad

      It’s a trade off for them, not for us. This isn’t just about tech or toys. Even if they did make the best possible headset, which it obviously won’t be since everything we can tell says it’s no more different than the Rift S was from the Rift, it wouldn’t be worth the long term disaster it would be for VR as a platform.

    • johann jensson

      I never understood this “medicore”. What is this? Do people really pronounce it “medicore”? LOL…

  • Andrew Jakobs

    Well, personally I don’t care as I use Facebook anyway. But I can imagine that if they push a headset with really good specs a lot of people will just go for the Facebook headset.
    And to be honest, something that was said 6! years ago is not something you really can take as definite answer, the world changes, business changes.. Even Facebook is different now than it was 6 years ago (for better or for worse, that’s up to you to decide).

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      I’m one of those who avoids Facebook. I had to create an account to access certain informations, but never posted anything and block Facebook domains. I wasn’t thrilled that Facebook bought Oculus, but without doubt their long term commitment and deep pockets were and will remain the driving force for pushing VR into the mass market. Unfortunately there simply is no other comparable contender.

      Requiring a Facebook account was to be expected from day one. Facebook payed two billion because they believe there is a big future in social VR, for them it makes no sense to keep it separate, and it is naive to assume that the promise made by and to Palmer Luckey would be true for eternity. Facebook could simply release a cheap Quest under the Facebook label, claiming that it isn’t an Oculus product and therefore requires a different account, and then drop Oculus completely in a few years. That way the original promise would have been kept, but the result would be pretty much the same.

      Companies are driven by money, which often requires changing plans. Its not deceit, it is things working out differently, e.g. VR not taking the world by storm and missing all the billion dollar market predictions from five years ago. Look at the graveyard of Google projects that weren’t sufficiently successful to invest more time and money. Daydream lies on this graveyard.

      So even if I like many others don’t like the Facebook account requirement, I get why it makes sense. I was working on several Oculus Go projects, Facebook basically screwed me over, but again, I understand why they killed it. For every HMD Oculus has sold there are about 1000 Facebook users. Pissing of the current VR users is unfortunate, but Facebook deals in billions of users, not a few hundred thousand enthusiasts. Selling games for the Quest isn’t a business model to make money, it is a way to grow VR so that one day their vision of social VR will become possible.

      I’m sure Facebook considered keeping the Oculus accounts separate, if only to avoid the current (minor) PR shitstorm. But in reality most Oculus users will not even have heard about it, many will (sometimes grudgingly) accept it. Every time anything is released in VR some people promise to never buy again, usually because their personal spec list wasn’t met. In the end it is just noise, the developers will have to go where the customers are, the customers will have to go where the devices are. And currently the most popular VR headset is only available from Facebook, and nobody else offers anything that can match the Quest for regular consumers.

      The best outcome from this might be a bigger market for other HMDs. HTC/Qualcomm desperately need a unique selling point, “no Facebook required” might help. And developers hopefully push more for open platforms like OpenXR and WebVR as a fallback in case the rules are changed again. Because even if I agree that this was inevitable and makes a lot of sense, I still think it is extremely important to keep Facebook from ever becoming so dominant in VR that it can no longer be worked around. They try very hard to become the default, be it messaging services or free internet access in developing countries. And they have given us more than enough evidence that they are willing to abuse their power, so we should always make sure there are alternatives. Even if the Facebook HMDs are the most convenient with the best cost/benefit ratio.

  • crim3

    R.I.P. Andrew Reisse, he wouldn’t had allowed any of this. It’s sad how one shitbag killing the wrong person can alter the lives of millions and even history.

  • Up until this very moment I’d been considering buying an Oculus Quest, a remarkable product saddled with an insufferable parent company…..

    • Ad

      It’s not a parent company, Oculus is a sticker brand, Facebook is the company.

  • Ad

    I find it a bizarre question in a lot of ways. Of course you’re going to be shown ads in the headset eventually. What we’re getting here is a combination of the worst of the facebook, apple, and google business strategies. They collect data to use for their ad machine outside the headset, they dominate the platform aggressively like apple and make it hard to leave, and they extract 30% of everything like google (including when they directly compete with people on the platform).

    They won’t show ads until people don’t have an easy out, but if they remain the only standalone in the game, or if their market share exceeds 70%, they won’t hold back. It’ll be subtle obviously but it will be significant. And the same people who defend them right now will be saying “there are ads in the newspaper, there are ads on youtube, what is wrong with a billboard in a VR world, why are you complaining?”

    I also find the idea of people saying this isn’t a big deal because you can make a burner account absurd. Even people with burner accounts report being suggested their real life friends and family as friends, even though they never gave enough info for that. Facebook follows you across the web collecting information (R2VR should interview one of the people who created Facebook Container) even when you aren’t on the site.

    And honestly, people are still assuming that this is just a requirement, not considering that using the headset will be using facebook just as much as using messenger on your phone is using facebook. They’re assuming that in headset communications will never be merged with messenger, that doing things in horizon won’t be a facebook platform function, that third party apps won’t rely on facebook integration into the API, that facebook’s payment services and a dozen other of their services won’t be in VR. And if they are, then using Oculus hardware means you’re using facebook, you’re using the account.

    At the end of the day people are going to war to try and improve the situation of phones being closed platforms, but we’re just walking into XR being much much worse. If VR could have been the dream people said it is, it’s actually going to be a nightmare.

  • iThinkMyCatIsAFlea

    Oculus didn’t get off to a good start.

    Palmer Luckey, a Trump supporter and Trump donor who also lied about attending a Trump rally while wearing a Trump T-shirt. He was involved in a Trump fundraiser on Reddit with Milo Yiannopoulos. He denied all of that. All of which is on Google.

    Palmer & his cronies then sold Oculus to Facebook. The most popular and free spyware around which Zuckerberg stole from others while at Harvard: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/feb/12/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ex-classmates

    Just let Oculus die…

    • poorkingz

      God forbid you support one of the two presidential candidates…

      • Hokhmah

        In my opinion I don’t get why americans even accept this whole two candidates and not really democratic “Winner-takes-all” electoral college system. This is very old one, not considering that in today’s world a more direct vote system would be technically no problem.

  • A man is worth what his word is worth. Facebook proves again its true nature behind the marketing image of the nice company that wants to connect people.

    That said, we were all expecting this moment, Facebook is slowly deleting Oculus since many months and it needs all the users to have a Fb account for its data gathering business

  • Chris Kirchenbauer

    I live in China and have a CV1. I have only occasional access to FB. Will my CV1 become disabled? Will it work offline?

    • johann jensson

      Well, since the headsets stops working until you force-update to the new drivers, every now and then, i guess there’s a possibility that you’ll lose your device.

      I once tried to use my Rift S while offline, and it took the software 5 minutes to start. Not a good sign…

  • dialmove

    *…for a capitalist company’s definition of “never”.

  • Azraal

    Well I admit I really thought it wouldn’t happen… But in retrospect…
    Anyway I won’t throw my headset away, until they lock me in. But I certainly won’t buy anything from their store anymore since I’ll probably switch to another vendor…
    I hope that there will be good inside out tracking headsets out of occulus

  • Timothy Bank

    The only reason they are requiring a FB account is to connect you with your friends. FB has stated that they want to make VR a social platform and why not piggyback on the FB framework.
    FB has done what no other company could have done for Oculus and it blows my mind that people are so shallow as to say otherwise. Just look at what is coming out of Facebook Labs (FBL) and you might understand.

    • Ad

      You can’t connect to your friends with an oculus account? Even their defenders aren’t making that case.

      • Timothy Bank

        Yes you can, but they need to have Oculus accounts. What they are trying to do is link your Oculus account and your FB account so that your friends (even those without and Oculus account) can connect with you.
        It makes perfect sense. Why not use your current social network to connect to your “gaming” social network. The connections are there and all they are doing is trying to bridge that gap.

        I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to find my friends on my Oculus account. This is because their names are typically not the same as their IRL Facebook names. John Doe is Thrasher345 in my Oculus world and if I want to find him and add him as an Oculus friend…good luck. If the Facebook account is tied to my Oculus account, then it makes the whole process a whole lot easier.

        So yes. Link my FB account so I can find my friends.

        • Ad

          …. This has always been possible. Putting aside the fact that there is no reason to want to friend non VR people on your VR headset. And the fact that this now means that people who know you on facebook can interact with you, not just your core friends or gaming friends (my PS4 is not connected to my former teachers and I’m glad). Plenty of apps allow for various forms of login, including logging in with a service of choice, and can have discoverability that way. And they could let a person search for a first name and location. This is much worse.

  • Kim from Texas

    I don’t expect any progressive/liberal company from Silicon Valley to keep any promises.

    • alboradasa

      Unlike all those trustworthy Conservative tech companies (that definitely exist)?

  • Let’s also remember that Oculus got funded while promising that their finished product would be multiplatform and specifically promising that it would support Linux. If there’s one thing I’ve learned to expect from Oculus it’s that they will back away from any promise if there’s more money in breaking it.
    They really don’t deserve anyone’s trust or money.

  • Oswald Spong

    You can’t trust Farcebook to keep a promise where privacy is concerned.

    Who saw that coming? (sarcastic)

  • _vrdude_

    Some people act like they have no choice but to use Oculus, as if there aren’t good alternatives. Name one feature only Oculus has you can’t live without.

    Oculus is not ahead of the competition and we have no reason to believe it will in the next 4 years also, especially since they aim to stay at the same price range.

    You can mention all those Reality Labs tech demos all you want but (a) independent researchers and those funded by Sony and Nvidia have not made any less progress there and (b) the tech from that research is quite expensive to mass produce.

    I work in the industry, I got the quotes for all those components (phase SLM LCoS, liquid crystal lenses, laser illumination system components and holographically recorded flat lenses, high accuracy actuators for mechanical varifocal lenses, etc.). Even Facebook can’t afford to put those in a 400 USD device.

  • xyzs

    I thought I was gonna be a long term Quest line-up customer, but the facebookisation of Oculus (that is gonna be renamed apparently Facebook Reality), that’s dead.

    It is like Amazon that wants to transform Twitch into Prime Gaming, they don’t understand that the Headquarter brand, nobody cares, and nobody likes it except the CEO.

    Oculus was nice but Facebook killed it.
    When we look at the situation today, Oculus : it’s 2 cheap pieces of hardware with a bad company behind who have a the most closed ecosystem and the less price deals, nothing to regret.

  • johann jensson

    Rift S was a good starter HMD in 2019, because it had good quality at the time, and was affordable. But having experienced the Oculus “ecosystem” first hand (and the rabid Oculus community) i quickly realized that i wouldn’t stay here for long.

    Skip to today, and i’m playing my last game on the Rift S – a heavily modded SkyrimVR with ENB and forced reprojection. I was one of the first wave of people who pre-ordered the Reverb G2, and will soon be gone to better places, like SteamVR and WMR. And so will be many many others…

  • NooYawker

    People believe him when he says protecting your personal data is important to them too. People are just gullible.

  • ManwellC

    Some company needs to step up and make an alternative portable VR headset.

  • Scott

    Back in 1989 I purchased an Apple IIgs (I was an Apple II wiz from the early 80’s) which was very expensive for me at that time in my life. Soon after Apple announced that they would no longer be making the IIgs and, soon after that, stopped supporting that product altogether. I also started developing for the Newton MessagePad and invested money in developing for that platform. Again, a few years later Apple discontinued and stopped supporting that platform as well. So, at that time, I vowed never to purchase another apple product or work to develop applications on Apple’s operating systems because anything I did would only have a life cycle of a few years at best.

    So I learned how to use a PC and centered my software development degrees around the Windows platform in order to avoid all things Apple. I never bought an iPod, never bought a Macintosh, never bought an iPad, never bought an iPhone and avoided Apple like a plague. If Apple was to just disregard their customers by cycling out tech year over year I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. Microsoft, on the other hand, worked hard to keep backward compatibility for 10+ years on their products and I loved it.

    Now, I’ve been an Oculus user for a while. I bought a DK2, then the Rift, then the Rift S and even bought a Quest for my parents. I was even thinking of getting a Oculus Go. But not anymore. I have purposely avoided having an active Facebook account, I don’t use it and don’t allow it to track my Internet usage. I go out of my way to avoid almost all forms of social media. I like my privacy. So for Oculus to force me to use Facebook is a bridge too far. I will continue using Oculus to play out the current games I have on the platform and then I will divest from my Oculus devices and sell them away. I will likely be buying a Valve Index and will never buy another Oculus product and will not recommend anyone that I know to buy one. This, like Apple’s early treatment of its customer base, is the worse decision Facebook could have made in reference to the Oculus platform from my point for view.

    • Hokhmah

      The thing is, Facebook most likely doesn’t care anymore about the enthusiast/tech-savvy VR users. They most likely are making the bet, that 2020/21 is now the right time to attack on casual/mainstream folks who just want an easy and fairly cheap solution to get in 6DOF VR and also use the headset for media, apps, social stuff, …

      The first one and even more leaks about the new Quest (solid tech for the masses, cheap price, white colored shiny design, …) all point in this direction. So even if they lose most of the present user base, if they get like 2-3 million new ones who are not informed or just ignore the whole Facebook data/privacy policies, the shareholders/investors will be happy.

      I’m fairly sure they will want to release the new Quest before Christmas and will push a huge marketing campaign for their Quest with nice videos, posters, … of good looking people having fun in VR. Most likely combining it with Horizon and how cool it is to hang out with your friends and family in VR. They want to be the Nintendo of VR, combined with a social platform.

  • Constantine XI

    I will not use Facebook. Not Now, Not Ever.

  • Ken T

    Y’all do not seem to understand that you are Facebooks product, not their customer.

    Facebooks customers are the corporations and governments that buy the data that Facebook steals from you.

    Facebook doesn’t care about you. You are the fruit that they squeeze the juice out of. Oculus was just a new kind of juicer.

    As of October 10 2020 the $2500 I have invested in oculus hardware and software will be inaccessible to me, because the only way to opt out of data collecting is to stop using the devices I paid for.

    I don’t forgive that. I am not rich. $2500 was a huge investment for me. To simply have all of that taken away is criminal. I know that there is nothing I can do about it just now…..other than to curse facebook and oculus for as long as I live, which I will do……

    It will be more than a year before I can afford new VR hardware. I bought into oculus so I could get into VR, and instead my choice has barred me from VR for the forseeable future.

    Facebook makes me hope that there is a hell.

  • oh. guess i’ll go valve vr instead then

  • marque2

    Really sad that the founder was thrown out of Facebook for the mere act of supporting Trump. Facebook is evil.

  • Steve

    This sounds remarkably like the scenario in Ready Player One – So I must identify Mark with Nolan and Facebook with IOI. Sadly, the oasis has turned into a desert wasteland!

  • DrMichael

    Facebook should be broken up by the government, AFTER facing a minimum $2Trillion dollar lawsuit for lying to Oculus consumers!!