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Unifying everything under the same account infrastructure is simply the right engineering choice. There's no need to try to explain this with ridiculous conspir
by jsnell 6y ago
Unifying everything under the same account infrastructure is simply the right engineering choice. There's no need to try to explain this with ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the only reason Facebook pumped billions into VR to get a million people to create a FB account.
Account security benefits massively from economies of scale, both in the sense of infrastructure and operationally. Oculus did not have that scale. There's probably a couple of million Oculus accounts vs. ten billion Facebook ones. The Oculus accounts are probably a similar PR nightmare waiting to happen, like the Ring accounts were for Amazon or the Nest accounts for Google.
In concrete terms, Facebook accounts will have better 2FA implementation than Oculus. They'll have better protection against credential stuffing or enumeration attacks. It's less likely there's going to be some kind of an authentication bypass, or a bug where plaintext passwords are getting logged, etc. Basically, for Facebook to continue using the Oculus account system rather than migrating off would be irresponsible, and the main surprise is that they've taken this long post-acquisition to do it.
FWIW, I've never had a Facebook account, despite some minor social pressure to get one for like the last 13 years. But that's just because none of their services has ever seemed interesting in any way. But I was totally OK creating one a few days ago after buying the Quest 2.
The only problem is that at least for now a Facebook account == Facebook social network profile. I wish they were more like Google or Microsoft accounts in that a) having an account doesn't imply use of any particular Facebook product, b) they allow use of separate profiles tied to the same main account (e.g. a MS account can be associated with Xbox gamer tags for gaiming, a Google account with Youtube brand accounts for posting videos). But that's something they haven't needed until now, I'm sure it'll come.
- hetspookjee 6y agoIf you make a Facebook account just for just the purpose of playing Quest 2, you will eventually be asked to provide ID verification of your account, or it will simply be locked. I am unsure if you find this an acceptable compromise, or something you thought about when you recently bought Quest 2, but I am very sure I do not find this acceptable in any sort of way. There's just no excuse for the need of ID verification just to be eligible to play a game on a device. Regarding your point of unifying it under a single account, sure, but does that account need so much data just to function? And on the other hand, why not just be able to create a partial account? A facebook account is so much more than just some random account, why would I need such an intricate account to play a game? So in short, yes in a technical way it's logical, but in every other way it's like shooting a mosquito with a bazooka.
- jsnell 6y agoIt didn't seem to need particularly much data, and all of it was justified. It's pretty much exactly the same as I gave e.g. Github and Steam. I don't particularly expect Facebook to continue locking accounts used to just for VR. Locking accounts is expensive, both in terms of customer support and PR. They don't want to do any more of it than they absolutely have to. Their team for preventing bulk account creation just hadn't considered this particular use case. But there's a ludicrous amount of signals available for non-bulkiness here, I expect them to sort it out very quickly.
- hetspookjee 6y agoThe examples you mention are both more lax in the data they require for registration, then compared with a Facebook registration. If you want a GitHub account you just give a username, email and pass. For Steam it's similar. You don't even need to give your first and last name.
- anonymousab 6y agoFacebook bans accounts for atypical behavior and incompatibility with their profit model. If you only use it for playing Oculus games and never post status updates, then you're simply counting the days until you are banned and your purchases are gone (the latter according to their ToS).
- jsnell 6y agoThis is just total economically illiterate nonsense. The value of an active Facebook user for advertising is about $25/year in revenue, $6/year in profit. Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus. They've sold a couple of million headsets. Let's say that they're all still active users. That's $1k per user. Do you see how utterly implausible your theory about the VR just being a vehicle to drive revenue is? It's not that the numbers don't add up. It's that the numbers are off by orders of magnitude. And oh, just by buying a Quest 2 and a few games, I'm already a far bigger source of revenue to Facebook than an average user of the social network part. The idea that they'd be knee-capping the whole ecosystem by intentionally disabling paying customers just to make pennies more on ads is ludicrous. I think it's basically guaranteed that the explanation from my original post stands: their anti-abuse team did not consider this use case when building their bulk account models, but will obviously consider it in the future. I'd happily make a bet that my account will not get "banned" in the next year, despite not having any Facebook friends or Facebook social network activity.