It’s becoming infinitely more clear as time progresses that Facebook as zero intention of offering the Oculus Rift as an actual VR platform as its primary focus; instead, it’s attempting to rope in as many users as possible into the extremely toxic social media platform that readily sells all data that you have to offer.
In exchange, you get to listen to those sweet racist rants from one of your distant relatives every Sunday.
To some, it’s a bit of a one-sided exchange that has been consistently losing its draw as time progresses; thus, the Facebook acquisition of one of the first commercially VR has been solely to rope people into its astoundingly large net of trackers and data-collection.
We’ve discussed recently how people attempting to stymie Facebook’s acquisition by making accounts with the absolute minimum of data results in a ban; they want your full legal name, telephone numbers, and some pictures in order to ensure that you are who you say that you are when you sign into the social media network.
After all, there’s little value in selling the data of a person that doesn’t exist.
Yet now, Oculus users that become fed-up with the consistent attempts to rope users into the social media network are finding something else entirely to struggle with; if you deleted your Facebook account, you lose every purchase you’ve ever made for your Oculus account.
You also lose all of your progress in titles (which matters admittedly less, since you will need to repurchase the titles regardless, which of course requires you to restart a Facebook account), and additional purchases such as DLC.
This is an unprecedented level of personal data aggregation, forcing users to either offer their data, or their pricey Oculus VR system effectively becomes a fancy paperweight with cords poking out of it.
This is how the earliest VR adopters are being treated, and it’s in extremely poor taste at the absolute minimum. For Oculus owners, there is currently absolute nothing they can do; attempts to separate the Oculus from Facebook thus far have been stymied, and the Oculus is set to lose the majority of its functions unless users capitulate to Facebook’s demands.
The outcry from the Oculus community has been monumental but has thus far apparently fallen on deaf ears from the Facebook staff. Effectively, Facebook is double-dipping in terms of monetization strategies, and this is where things get a bit dicey; if Facebook can survive this egregious malfeasance, and get people to stay with the Oculus platform, there’s a not-too-distant future where other consoles begin the same.
