During the Facebook Connect livestream, the social media company announced that Oculus Quest VR headsets will no longer require a Facebook account, which I refuse to use.
“As we’ve focused more on work, and frankly, as we’ve heard your feedback more broadly, we’re working on making it so that you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his keynote speech. “We’re starting to test support for work accounts soon.”
A Facebook account was required for all new Oculus Quest users in October 2020. If you deleted your Facebook account, all of your game progress and purchases would be lost. A Facebook account had to be linked to an old Oculus account by 2023. This change will be overridden by Facebook’s new policy.
After purchasing an Oculus Quest, users can delete their social media account without losing the content they’ve already purchased. Until we meet again. That said, the timing of these changes is unknown, so it’s recommended that users keep their accounts open for now. (Read: What is the metaverse? 2 media and information experts explain)
While Facebook and Instagram continue to lose young users, this is a major concession from the company. Young people have “have a wide range of negative associations with Facebook including privacy concerns [and] impact to their wellbeing.,” according to Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox.
Not having to link your Oculus headsets with a Facebook account came in handy during their recent service outage, incidentally. While users were able to play offline games, they were unable to access the Oculus store or play any games that relied on Facebook’s servers. The only thing we can hope for is that these work accounts are less vulnerable to server-wide failure.
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