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I don’t know that anyone needed another reason to dislike Facebook’s decision to fuse Oculus accounts into its own Borg-like mass, but in case you didn’t have enough of them, here’s another: Delete your Facebook account and your games are gone, forever.
Important VR PSA: 👉 Deactivating your Facebook profile disables your Oculus Profile.
👉 Deleting your Facebook account takes away all your games, purchases, and progress.
Source: Eli Schwartz pic.twitter.com/dSJIcIf0ki— Cix (@CixLiv) October 22, 2020
Facebook would undoubtedly argue that it’s just carrying out the end-user’s wish to be forgotten and that it isn’t the only company to have a policy like this. Blizzard’s Battle.net client notes that deleting your Blizzard account will also delete all of your purchase history with the company. You’ll lose your games, characters, records, and all associated data.
The difference in how the two situations feel is instructive as to why Facebook should have left Oculus and Facebook on separate systems. I might wish to step away from using Facebook without quitting VR, or wish to quit the Oculus ecosystem without deleting my Facebook account. Now that the two are joined at the hip, there’s no way to do so. Your VR gaming and your social media life are welded together, whether you like it or not. Will you be able to avoid sharing your own gaming information with other individuals? Undoubtedly. Corporations? Not a chance. Will Facebook relentlessly push you to share that information, at every turn? Undoubtedly.
In other, unrelated news, Palmer Luckey (founder, Oculus) and Robert Long (senior software engineer, Mozilla) are teaming up to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone who can jailbreak the Quest 2.
I’m still offering $5000 for a Quest 2 jailbreak! Jailbreakers, dm me. Let’s break free of FB’s anti-competitive, anti-privacy ecosystem! https://t.co/TYI0Uy1YsF
— Robert Long (@arobertlong) October 14, 2020
Long is one of the developers who opposed the fusion of Facebook and Oculus, saying in August: “I will no longer be working on VR projects for the Oculus platform. Including Oculus Browser specific WebXR features. If a Facebook account will be required for me to develop on Oculus’ platform then I’m not interested in supporting them further.”
Facebook has faced no meaningful penalty for its decision to combine accounts in this fashion and sales of the Quest 2 have reportedly outstripped the original Quest. There have been issues around this launch, with readers reporting being issued permabans after trying to register a new Facebook account for the first time, and other users not being able to use their devices post-account fusion. Facebook has been responsive to these issues according to multiple reports.
In this case, if you like VR, be advised that walking away from Facebook now carries an additional penalty: You’ll be permanently quitting the Oculus ecosystem and losing whatever investment you’ve made into it.
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