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Facebook and Oculus: What You Need to Know
Whether you are “okay” with Facebook or loathe them with every fiber of your being, Facebook made a radical takeover of the Oculus VR platform. Before investing heavily into the ecosystem, you need to have the facts about what it really means and how it can impact everyone — not just the “Facebook haters”.
There are several unknowns about this whole situation, and we’re going to discuss those, too.
I’ll do this in an FAQ style to make it a bit easier to skim for answers and hopefully keep it as factual as possible; I do recommend reading it in its entirety. If you find any of this in error or have other information that would be useful to my readers, I would appreciate dropping me a line so I can represent this as factually as possible.
Note: The data in this article comes directly from the Oculus website’s announcement from August 18, 2020. The Facebook cut over was October 11th, 2020 at which point it became impossible for new users of Oculus products to own and operate these products without a Facebook account.
What’s Going On?
On Jan 1, 2023 — all Oculus products will require a Facebook account. This is regardless of whether you have an existing Oculus account or not. You will be required to merge that account into a Facebook account.
New Oculus products (such as the Quest 2) will immediately require Facebook accounts — even if you have an existing Oculus account.
Anyone registering any Oculus hardware (old or new) with a new account after October 11th, 2020 will be required to have a Facebook account as their device’s only account.
Those with an existing Oculus account and hardware have a grace period to continue using their Oculus accounts and not merging/using a Facebook account. This grace period ends on January 1, 2023; 730 days from the time of this article.
Why are people reacting so negatively to this requirement?
Bottom line; some people don’t like Facebook. They don’t like the company, they don’t like being part of the advertising machine or maybe they want to remain anonymous on the internet. Facebook’s Terms of Service (called Community Standards) forbid…
