11 ms·

The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story rig

The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. It is the exact reason Facebook is a nice way to login to mobile multiplayer games. > They care about it only insofar as it gets you to use a Facebook account. Right. Facebook acquired a niche gaming platform that posed absolutely no threat to any Facebook business not because it was cool and extremely risky and why not. They acquired it to grow user counts in (checks notes) the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world. I don't know dude. There are kids who use YouTube for years on the same device, easily and uncontrovertibly trackable without an account, who are bombarded with more advertising in a day than most high-tech-proficiency adults using Oculus, like me, using adblockers, see in a year. YouTube targets ads to users without accounts! Everyone tracks everyone without accounts, every day, every website you visit, all the time! And of course that includes demographic factors, as though watching kids YouTube material doesn't give away that a kid is watching. You don't need an account to tell you the user's demographics. Their friends and likes. You don't need those things. And then what? So what if game developers learn the demographics and friends of their users. People have been measuring stuff about who goes to movie theaters, who checks out books, who listens to radio, for decades. What's the worst they're going to do, make more video games that find diverse, niche audiences they did not otherwise serve? Oh the humanity. And then what the hell is some conventional brand going to learn from someone's Oculus play history? It's completely moronic, there's absolutely no economic value there. Next you're going to tell me, oh it's horrible they created a VR Chat clone. Nobody is going to force Oculus users to use their shitty VR Chat clone (Horizon). What then are they going to learn from people? There is nothing to learn from VR Chat. The user account story is just so absurd, it's so off the mark. Account or not they will be able to easily create quality, targeted advertising.

dylan604 6y ago
> the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world. Oh my me, please let this be true. That would mean anyone born from today forward will never sign up for Facebook. Eventually the billions currently using it will all just die off naturally, and the user base will shrink to zero because "possibly" nobody will ever use it again. beep beep beep beep beep. just my alarm clock waking me from a glorious dream.
- danielheath 6y ago
  I don't know if I'm misreading, but I took "the one app" to refer to "virtual reality headsets". I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but there are some good arguments for the idea that VR may not meaningfully grow from the size it is now.
  - karatinversion 6y ago
    FWIW, I read “the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world” to mean Facebook itself.
johncozen 6y ago
This comment reads like someone who’s is incredibly clueless regarding personal privacy.
- jaen 6y ago
  This comment reads like a lazy ad hominem attack with no rational explanation for its position.
- radu_floricica 6y ago
  Please note that being clued in and being a zealot are very different things. Which is probably the greatest issue of our times - if you don't scream your support for something at the top of your lungs, you must be against it. Nothing parent says suggest he's clueless. He just made a rather common sense observation that investing in a very niche hardware company has a very poor ROI if your goal is getting accounts. But by doing this he BETRAYED THE CAUSE, so you must call him clueless to put him in his place. Bah.
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    I beg to differ. PP seems to see nothing wrong with Facebook breaking your property - that is, rendering your games and your hardware literally useless - simply because FB doesn't "care" about VR. No. Wrong. This is clueless. If I spend a few hundred dollars to buy a headset and a game, Facebook has no legal or moral basis to take it away from me just because I won't use their other services. It isn't a "privacy" issue. It's a theft issue. Being pro-theft is clueless.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Both of you can be correct. FB shouldn't require an FB account for Oculus, and Oculus is not a major source of ad data for them. I replied up thread, but given the ubiquity of web and app tracking for FB, Oculus is almost certainly not incremental to their understanding of almost any user.
    - radu_floricica 6y ago
EricMausler 6y ago
Why develop a game for a niche if you can just bombard an entire demographic with the same ads that no one outside of that demographic sees until they polarize themselves into purchasing a game you've already developed
Gunax 6y ago
You are probably right--but I don't understand why they are pushing this aside from wanting to further their Facebook application. > The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. It is the exact reason Facebook is a nice way to login to mobile multiplayer games. Can you elaborate? What's the issue with multiplayer games? I own a Rift and I play (mostly Echo Combat) online... I don't see what's wrong with the games or why a facebook link would make it any better.
- bryan_w 6y ago
  Having multiple login systems is an integrity/spam disaster waiting to happen. You have to reimplement whatever detectors and filters twice and hope that nothing messes up and lets Jim the perv who was kicked from messenger move onto courting Billy on the quest.
  - derangedHorse 6y ago
    Why should Jim’s history on Messenger affect his account on Oculus? If Oculus accounts truly were kept separate than whatever mechanism Jim used to find Billy with his Oculus account, he could’ve also used to find Billy on any other communication platform. I saw one comment in a previous post who echoes my sentiment perfectly: Facebook has not only become a universal identity provider but is now providing universal authorization, which is a problem.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jiofih 6y ago
    Why isn’t HN offering Login with Facebook here right now? Would you be excited about that?
- postingawayonhn 6y ago
  > I don't understand why they are pushing this aside from wanting to further their Facebook application. Because they want to build an integrated services and hardware ecosystem just like Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
osobo 6y ago
You are treating VR like it's another browser. It's not. With cameras in every direction scanning and parsing your environment, data on your physical fitness and the always-on nature of the Quest 2 it is far more invasive than even Google Home speakers are. You offer a whole new set of very personal data to a company that has proven itself to mine it extensively for its own gain.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  Are you saying FB is trying to target ads based on 3D mapping of homes/bodies while the headset is lying around unused? Or what exactly is the theory here?
  - osobo 6y ago
    If you own an Oculus, you know how eery the boundary mapping is. Before they switched it off, you'd be able to see your boundary from outside its fencing. Some users report being able to see the boundary from a different room. So not only does the headset map your environment inside the boundary, it actually maps and parses the rest as well. It doesn't have GPS so it wouldn't know how otherwise to determine your position relative to the boundary. This means Oculus maps every space it is in, including the objects in it. Really, this tells FB far more about your life and general affluence than any type of browsing behavior ever could. Same goes for fitness tracking. Inside actual fitness games but in other VR titles as well. Again, this generates a ton of very personal data that, combined with other databases, unlocks a ton of value for advertisers. This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account: For all this data to be really valuable, you need to be able to have it down to an individual resolution (that is: You know all the data is generated by a single individual, so you can combine it). All of this, combined with existing data-generation, is a whole new level of invasion of privacy.
    - vrperson 6y ago
      So far, targeted ads don't really seem to work that well (studies have found). I don't think getting the size of my rooms will be that much of an improvement. They can infer maybe how much money I have, but they can probably already guess that from my address and my credit card company also knows. It's not even clear that the data about my rooms is transferred to Facebook. I don't think making better targeted ads is the play here. I think they want to dominate social networking, and they think a lot of social networking will take place in VR in the future.
petre 6y ago
YT ad targeting is crap. I watch bicycle videos and get ads for potato chips, shampoo and food delivery services exploiting young people working as bike couriers. It's like cable TV hogwash detergent commercials reloaded.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  I think part of the issue is that there’s less variety of video ad content out there than static ads. There may not be very many ad dollars out there producing and buying time for video ads you find interesting.
- rtx 6y ago
  They are more like tv ads done for branding.
mihaaly 6y ago
Your multiplayer argument was valid if VR gaming - or any VR, or perhaps any gaming - was multiplayer only. Or if VR was not available for any other activity than gaming! With the same effort you could argue not to use computers or your phone without logging into Facebook since those are for communication and collaboration! Multiplayer is one of the features not some exclusive condition to turn on your devise for god's sake! Even then mere sync certain(!) data from(!) a chosen(!) account was sufficient. Multiplayer works without Facebook, as we see with 'some' products. Also tracking of individuals was NOT there for decades but for a population! Learn the difference. And still it was not all right at all if there was, there are laws made decades ago against unwarranted tracking and tracing! (so it is knowingly unwelcome, not being a nice things, especially for children, whatever loophole some make for themselves to do anyway!) Also the complaint was not about others do more ad but that very few does real product development for the sake of good products instead of ad maximizing tricks and honeypots. Get your thoughts in order please!....
- nefitty 6y ago
  The exclamation marks make your comment hard to read.
ericflo 6y ago
It's not at all about those things. This move is about entertwining Oculus and Facebook in such a way that Oculus can't be trivially broken apart from Facebook once antitrust regulators set their sights on the company.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Regulators have a hard enough time believing true things about encryption and back doors — I expect that if regulators see FB do this and have a problem with it they will say “your problem, not ours” and order the split anyway.
  - sgift 6y ago
    We will see - this is exactly Facebooks strategy with Instagram right now: Arguing that they have invested so much effort to integrate it with Facebook services (which they were prohibited from) that it would be far too expensive to force them to change it back. I hope the regulators throw that in their face and order it anyway, but the jury is still out.
randomsearch 6y ago
VR is one of the few existential threats to Facebook’s dominance. Connecting with people is an obvious killer app of VR. That’s why Facebook bought Oculus.
- taneq 6y ago
  This. Facebook bought Oculus for the same reason Google developed Android: As a response to a new platform that threatened to bypass their monopolies and render them redundant.
  - seg_lol 6y ago
    If antitrust law was effective, it would prevent this kind of anti-competitive behavior. How exactly, I'll leave that for the experts.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  its really not. The existential threat is that they don't operate their own platform. VR isn't their end goal, AR is. The big bet is that AR will replace mobile phones. Owning the platform means profit from device sales and 30% cut of all apps sold. Thats the end game.
mekkkkkk 6y ago
So the reason they require a FB account is only pure altruism to create a better multiplayer experience for customers? That's cool and not absurd at all. Tuning the omnipresent Algorithm by your actions in VR might not be a major driver, sure. But locking you into the FB ecosystem and by extension increasing your exposure to FB controlled "personalized" content sure could be. Of course it will also feed back into the Algorithm as well, because why not.
derangedHorse 6y ago
1) Finding your friends on Oculus could be done with Facebook connectivity rather than consolidating Oculus accounts with Facebook 2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous) 3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  > 2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous) They really, really are. They have 2.7bn MAU, and even the people who no longer use the service probably still have accounts. They almost certainly have an account on 80% of all the people in the developed countries in the world. Like, most of their recent growth has come from the developing world, because they subsidise internet access to juice the user numbers for the Street. They're not doing it to make money today, it's all about making sure that they are ubiquitous. > 3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc. You are wildly underestimating the data that FB get from web/app tracking. Consider, if you're a gamer you probably visit game websites for socialisation or advice. The only benefit of the account stuff (from an ads perspective) is being able to sell access to Oculus users to Oculus app makers. Like, FB already get pings from pretty much every website and app in existence, so they already know where people spend their time, no need for Oculus for that. I personally think that tying Oculus to FB is a terrible idea which will get them in loads of trouble from an anti-trust perspective, but they're almost certainly doing it to reduce costs, rather than to get gamers data (which they already have, btw).
beowulfey 6y ago
Personally, I think Mark Zuckerburg wants to run an OASIS. Merging Facebook and VR would be a long term strategy for generating the ultimate virtual second life.
op03 6y ago
Good job. I recruit for Facebook. Send me you resume. What people also don't get is Match making is a big problem while making babies too. Our Facebook Parenting portal makes baby making simple by requiring a Facebook account. But its been a hard sell and we need people like you to enlighten the herd.
- jayparth 6y ago
  Your comment is written weirdly so I don't really get your point but I think you are being sarcastic and calling the dude you replied to a bootlicker. But that person actually had a valid point here. Login with Facebook is a relatively well received feature for third parties. Why would a first party platform use a bespoke solution? Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern. There's plenty of Facebook to hate if you look, but most people just blindly apply their dogmatic hate everywhere.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    > Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern Is it so? Are you conveniently forgetting the privacy violations, data sharing with third parties and manipulation of public sentiment that FB was the agent for, not long ago?
    - jayparth 6y ago
      Your comment is actually pretty ironic. You're saying hating on FB is justified. That's not my point at all, although I agree with you. My point is that it's conformist, and aggressively conformist people will apply the hate blindly, like what's happening here.
tsimionescu 6y ago
> The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. Matchmaking based on FB friends lists is a horrible idea, at least for competitive games. I don't want to play games with my young nephews, and I don't want to play random games with someone who is more or less experienced then me. If you want to play games with friends, there are simple features exactly for that, and game-specific friends lists. Using the FB social graph for this is counter-productive.
sudosysgen 6y ago
The problem of VR matchmaking is already solved via Steam. Oculus doesn't want to use steam, but most will agree that Steam is preferable to Facebook for matchmaking. It's a truly manufactured problem for a manufactured solution.

dylan604 6y ago

> the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world. Oh my me, please let this be true. That would mean anyone born from today forward will never sign up for Facebook. Eventually the billions currently using it will all just die off naturally, and the user base will shrink to zero because "possibly" nobody will ever use it again. beep beep beep beep beep. just my alarm clock waking me from a glorious dream.

danielheath 6y ago
I don't know if I'm misreading, but I took "the one app" to refer to "virtual reality headsets". I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but there are some good arguments for the idea that VR may not meaningfully grow from the size it is now.
- karatinversion 6y ago
  FWIW, I read “the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world” to mean Facebook itself.

johncozen 6y ago

This comment reads like someone who’s is incredibly clueless regarding personal privacy.

jaen 6y ago
This comment reads like a lazy ad hominem attack with no rational explanation for its position.
radu_floricica 6y ago
Please note that being clued in and being a zealot are very different things. Which is probably the greatest issue of our times - if you don't scream your support for something at the top of your lungs, you must be against it. Nothing parent says suggest he's clueless. He just made a rather common sense observation that investing in a very niche hardware company has a very poor ROI if your goal is getting accounts. But by doing this he BETRAYED THE CAUSE, so you must call him clueless to put him in his place. Bah.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  I beg to differ. PP seems to see nothing wrong with Facebook breaking your property - that is, rendering your games and your hardware literally useless - simply because FB doesn't "care" about VR. No. Wrong. This is clueless. If I spend a few hundred dollars to buy a headset and a game, Facebook has no legal or moral basis to take it away from me just because I won't use their other services. It isn't a "privacy" issue. It's a theft issue. Being pro-theft is clueless.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Both of you can be correct. FB shouldn't require an FB account for Oculus, and Oculus is not a major source of ad data for them. I replied up thread, but given the ubiquity of web and app tracking for FB, Oculus is almost certainly not incremental to their understanding of almost any user.
  - radu_floricica 6y ago

EricMausler 6y ago

Why develop a game for a niche if you can just bombard an entire demographic with the same ads that no one outside of that demographic sees until they polarize themselves into purchasing a game you've already developed

Gunax 6y ago

You are probably right--but I don't understand why they are pushing this aside from wanting to further their Facebook application. > The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. It is the exact reason Facebook is a nice way to login to mobile multiplayer games. Can you elaborate? What's the issue with multiplayer games? I own a Rift and I play (mostly Echo Combat) online... I don't see what's wrong with the games or why a facebook link would make it any better.

bryan_w 6y ago
Having multiple login systems is an integrity/spam disaster waiting to happen. You have to reimplement whatever detectors and filters twice and hope that nothing messes up and lets Jim the perv who was kicked from messenger move onto courting Billy on the quest.
- derangedHorse 6y ago
  Why should Jim’s history on Messenger affect his account on Oculus? If Oculus accounts truly were kept separate than whatever mechanism Jim used to find Billy with his Oculus account, he could’ve also used to find Billy on any other communication platform. I saw one comment in a previous post who echoes my sentiment perfectly: Facebook has not only become a universal identity provider but is now providing universal authorization, which is a problem.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jiofih 6y ago
  Why isn’t HN offering Login with Facebook here right now? Would you be excited about that?
postingawayonhn 6y ago
> I don't understand why they are pushing this aside from wanting to further their Facebook application. Because they want to build an integrated services and hardware ecosystem just like Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

osobo 6y ago

You are treating VR like it's another browser. It's not. With cameras in every direction scanning and parsing your environment, data on your physical fitness and the always-on nature of the Quest 2 it is far more invasive than even Google Home speakers are. You offer a whole new set of very personal data to a company that has proven itself to mine it extensively for its own gain.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
Are you saying FB is trying to target ads based on 3D mapping of homes/bodies while the headset is lying around unused? Or what exactly is the theory here?
- osobo 6y ago
  If you own an Oculus, you know how eery the boundary mapping is. Before they switched it off, you'd be able to see your boundary from outside its fencing. Some users report being able to see the boundary from a different room. So not only does the headset map your environment inside the boundary, it actually maps and parses the rest as well. It doesn't have GPS so it wouldn't know how otherwise to determine your position relative to the boundary. This means Oculus maps every space it is in, including the objects in it. Really, this tells FB far more about your life and general affluence than any type of browsing behavior ever could. Same goes for fitness tracking. Inside actual fitness games but in other VR titles as well. Again, this generates a ton of very personal data that, combined with other databases, unlocks a ton of value for advertisers. This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account: For all this data to be really valuable, you need to be able to have it down to an individual resolution (that is: You know all the data is generated by a single individual, so you can combine it). All of this, combined with existing data-generation, is a whole new level of invasion of privacy.
  - vrperson 6y ago
    So far, targeted ads don't really seem to work that well (studies have found). I don't think getting the size of my rooms will be that much of an improvement. They can infer maybe how much money I have, but they can probably already guess that from my address and my credit card company also knows. It's not even clear that the data about my rooms is transferred to Facebook. I don't think making better targeted ads is the play here. I think they want to dominate social networking, and they think a lot of social networking will take place in VR in the future.

petre 6y ago

YT ad targeting is crap. I watch bicycle videos and get ads for potato chips, shampoo and food delivery services exploiting young people working as bike couriers. It's like cable TV hogwash detergent commercials reloaded.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
I think part of the issue is that there’s less variety of video ad content out there than static ads. There may not be very many ad dollars out there producing and buying time for video ads you find interesting.
rtx 6y ago
They are more like tv ads done for branding.

mihaaly 6y ago

Your multiplayer argument was valid if VR gaming - or any VR, or perhaps any gaming - was multiplayer only. Or if VR was not available for any other activity than gaming! With the same effort you could argue not to use computers or your phone without logging into Facebook since those are for communication and collaboration! Multiplayer is one of the features not some exclusive condition to turn on your devise for god's sake! Even then mere sync certain(!) data from(!) a chosen(!) account was sufficient. Multiplayer works without Facebook, as we see with 'some' products. Also tracking of individuals was NOT there for decades but for a population! Learn the difference. And still it was not all right at all if there was, there are laws made decades ago against unwarranted tracking and tracing! (so it is knowingly unwelcome, not being a nice things, especially for children, whatever loophole some make for themselves to do anyway!) Also the complaint was not about others do more ad but that very few does real product development for the sake of good products instead of ad maximizing tricks and honeypots. Get your thoughts in order please!....

nefitty 6y ago
The exclamation marks make your comment hard to read.

ericflo 6y ago

It's not at all about those things. This move is about entertwining Oculus and Facebook in such a way that Oculus can't be trivially broken apart from Facebook once antitrust regulators set their sights on the company.

ben_w 6y ago
Regulators have a hard enough time believing true things about encryption and back doors — I expect that if regulators see FB do this and have a problem with it they will say “your problem, not ours” and order the split anyway.
- sgift 6y ago
  We will see - this is exactly Facebooks strategy with Instagram right now: Arguing that they have invested so much effort to integrate it with Facebook services (which they were prohibited from) that it would be far too expensive to force them to change it back. I hope the regulators throw that in their face and order it anyway, but the jury is still out.

randomsearch 6y ago

VR is one of the few existential threats to Facebook’s dominance. Connecting with people is an obvious killer app of VR. That’s why Facebook bought Oculus.

taneq 6y ago
This. Facebook bought Oculus for the same reason Google developed Android: As a response to a new platform that threatened to bypass their monopolies and render them redundant.
- seg_lol 6y ago
  If antitrust law was effective, it would prevent this kind of anti-competitive behavior. How exactly, I'll leave that for the experts.
KaiserPro 6y ago
its really not. The existential threat is that they don't operate their own platform. VR isn't their end goal, AR is. The big bet is that AR will replace mobile phones. Owning the platform means profit from device sales and 30% cut of all apps sold. Thats the end game.

mekkkkkk 6y ago

So the reason they require a FB account is only pure altruism to create a better multiplayer experience for customers? That's cool and not absurd at all. Tuning the omnipresent Algorithm by your actions in VR might not be a major driver, sure. But locking you into the FB ecosystem and by extension increasing your exposure to FB controlled "personalized" content sure could be. Of course it will also feed back into the Algorithm as well, because why not.

derangedHorse 6y ago

1) Finding your friends on Oculus could be done with Facebook connectivity rather than consolidating Oculus accounts with Facebook 2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous) 3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
> 2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous) They really, really are. They have 2.7bn MAU, and even the people who no longer use the service probably still have accounts. They almost certainly have an account on 80% of all the people in the developed countries in the world. Like, most of their recent growth has come from the developing world, because they subsidise internet access to juice the user numbers for the Street. They're not doing it to make money today, it's all about making sure that they are ubiquitous. > 3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc. You are wildly underestimating the data that FB get from web/app tracking. Consider, if you're a gamer you probably visit game websites for socialisation or advice. The only benefit of the account stuff (from an ads perspective) is being able to sell access to Oculus users to Oculus app makers. Like, FB already get pings from pretty much every website and app in existence, so they already know where people spend their time, no need for Oculus for that. I personally think that tying Oculus to FB is a terrible idea which will get them in loads of trouble from an anti-trust perspective, but they're almost certainly doing it to reduce costs, rather than to get gamers data (which they already have, btw).

beowulfey 6y ago

Personally, I think Mark Zuckerburg wants to run an OASIS. Merging Facebook and VR would be a long term strategy for generating the ultimate virtual second life.

op03 6y ago

Good job. I recruit for Facebook. Send me you resume. What people also don't get is Match making is a big problem while making babies too. Our Facebook Parenting portal makes baby making simple by requiring a Facebook account. But its been a hard sell and we need people like you to enlighten the herd.

jayparth 6y ago
Your comment is written weirdly so I don't really get your point but I think you are being sarcastic and calling the dude you replied to a bootlicker. But that person actually had a valid point here. Login with Facebook is a relatively well received feature for third parties. Why would a first party platform use a bespoke solution? Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern. There's plenty of Facebook to hate if you look, but most people just blindly apply their dogmatic hate everywhere.
- jiofih 6y ago
  > Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern Is it so? Are you conveniently forgetting the privacy violations, data sharing with third parties and manipulation of public sentiment that FB was the agent for, not long ago?
  - jayparth 6y ago
    Your comment is actually pretty ironic. You're saying hating on FB is justified. That's not my point at all, although I agree with you. My point is that it's conformist, and aggressively conformist people will apply the hate blindly, like what's happening here.

tsimionescu 6y ago

> The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. Matchmaking based on FB friends lists is a horrible idea, at least for competitive games. I don't want to play games with my young nephews, and I don't want to play random games with someone who is more or less experienced then me. If you want to play games with friends, there are simple features exactly for that, and game-specific friends lists. Using the FB social graph for this is counter-productive.

sudosysgen 6y ago

The problem of VR matchmaking is already solved via Steam. Oculus doesn't want to use steam, but most will agree that Steam is preferable to Facebook for matchmaking. It's a truly manufactured problem for a manufactured solution.