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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Do not stay away from Oculus.

The Quest 2 is amazing and an important leap for VR. If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.

Frankly, this is not the hill to die on. If you plan to own a smartphone or really use any kind of service or internet browsing in the modern world going forward you’re going to be faced with these kind of privacy dilemmas. Better to just accept it and move on with your life than to basically live like a Luddite for the rest of your life. Facebook will not be the first or last corporation to ask you to relax your absolute anonymity.

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Are you a Facebook employee or something?

This is absolutely the hill to die on. Oculus has competitors. The answer to save VR isn't to buy Oculus, it's to buy other headsets and hope Oculus dies unless they reverse their decision to require a Facebook account.

> Oculus has competitors.

I wish that was true. If that was the case, I would've bought a headset from a competitor in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, while there are many competitive VR headsets out there, I cannot recall a single other VR headset that works standalone without a PC.

Not even mentioning the price point of Quest and the fact that it can be used for both PCVR and standalone, thus bringing a superset of features of other headsets. No need to set up lightboxes and being able to just buy the headset and play without anything extra is a value proposition that I don't see any other VR headset can provide.

Hopefully, the success of Quest will provide a kick in the ass to other manufacturers to make their own versions. Imo, the standalone+PCVR combo with no lightboxes is the future, with lightbox PCVR-only headsets being reserved for highly niche uses.

The masses need to buy VR headsets. If people can’t buy an amazing VR headset for $300 VR is dead in a shallow grave.

The masses should probably be buying PlayStation VR anyway. The VR market might honestly be better off without Facebook's image attached to it.

Excellent, better it be dead on FB's terms than create yet one more technology we turn into a horror show.

Nobody needs to buy a VR headset, let alone Facebook's. It's an expensive toy.

Mate, if Facebook actually cared about the VR scene they wouldn’t have broken the best VR headset to date by _requiring_ a fb login. Without a fb login the device is broken. If _they_ wanted VR to succeed they wouldn’t have done this. Take it up with them.

A wild false dichotomy has appeared !

If only there were other companies with competing products which would assuage one’s concerns regarding privacy and/or anonymity and guard against Luddite lifestyles.

“Must sell well...hill to die on” feel a bit extreme, particularly given everything that has transpired in 2020.

Other VR headsets are far more expensive and some require tethering to expensive gaming computers. Oculus Quest 2 has no true competitor at its price point, and some might say any price point.

> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company

Well, at least you know yourself, but I don't appreciate this attempt to normalize your moral bankruptcy and ridicule others who haven't sold and don't want to sell their soul.

Maybe one day you'll be forced to confront the consequences of this lack of ethics. Until then, kindly fuck right off.

> If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.

Isn't the opposite true? If I care about the state of VR as a product free of social media lock-in, I want Oculus to fail hard.

Getting locked out of your brand new device worth several hundred dollars is not a "privacy dilemma".

I have a Gear VR and I've been on the fence about upgrading to a real proper mobile VR setup but thankfully Oculus required this Facebook integration and made this decision a lot easier.

I will put my money somewhere else.

It's funny that you are talking about Luddites because those were basically beaten into submission by police.

I sense a shill.

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