Delete Facebook and You'll Lose All Oculus Games for Good
gamespot.com
gamespot.com
This is what I see as the biggest overlooked consequence of web advertising--it's become so lucrative, that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems. All of the profits (and thus jobs, investment) is in how to tune the ad algorithm.
Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard. Writing games is hard. If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.
The problem is of course not unique to software. Eg. it may be more lucrative for drug companies to research hair-loss or acne drugs than something like cholera.
This doesn't seem especially unreasonable; hair loss and acne, to the extent they are problems, are unsolved problems. Nobody disputes that cholera is a problem, but it is very much a solved problem.
I completely agree with you that this causes a misallocation of resources, but mental health is probably not the best example you could have chosen.
The other big example of this problem is the massive overgrowth of the FIRE sector, which has largely eaten the US economy whole while accomplishing nothing other than its own enrichment.
[0] For the purposes of this argument, 'actual stuff' does apply to intangible goods, like software, that expands the production possibilities curve.
I have worked in this industry on and off for almost a decade now, and in general, advertising is only used for users who will never pay. I mean, it makes sense right?
You can get $5 for one IAP, and if you are incredibly lucky $5 CPM which is 1000 impressions. In-app advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of revenue for most mobile gaming companies.
That being said, everyone spends on it because the best way to find people who'll play mobile games is to target people who play mobile games.
Cross-promotion also exists in just about every other media format (books, TV, movies...).
American corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder return. The entire public company system in the US is a paperclip maximizer that is designed to vacuum up every bit of economic value available on the face of the earth and give it to shareholders.
With 80% of all US stock value owned by 10% of Americans[0], the emergent goal of the economy is to suck up every available cent and give it to people like Bezos and Zucker------.
For people like Bezos and Zucker------, that's a good thing. For the rest of us? Not so much.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/...
This is a myth.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2...
“The court may hold forth on the primacy of shareholder interests, or may hold forth on the importance of socially responsible conduct, but ultimately it does not matter. Under either approach, directors who consider nonshareholder interests in making corporate decisions, like directors who do not, will be insulated from liability by the business judgment rule.[9]”
This thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674 has a lot of quotes from primary sources and legal analysis, and reaches a similar conclusion: directors can largely do as they please.
Acting in shareholders interest is not strictly equal to optimizing shareholder returns.
"If the legal obligation to maximize profit for shareholders existed we would have to develop a good definition of how is is to be measured."
Translation of this bad argument: "Everyone uses words differently, so laws are impossible."
We have almost a century of stockholder lawsuits, some successful, to show how ridiculous this argument is.
However this does not need to be the case. If the owners/shareholders want they can demand the company to be responsible for the environment, to be socially responsible as well, or to do basic research instead of maximising short term profits. It just requires the majority of shareholders to want that, and right now this still isn't the case.
This is actually something I picked up from reading Milton Friedman's books, where a corporation exists to do the will of the owners/shareholders. Maybe I read it wrong but that's what I understood it as.
Not only to use a Facebook account, but to have access to even more intensive and intrusive monitoring and information harvesting from users. All sorts of biometric and behavioral activity that is integral to using VR will now all be available to Facebook to integrate into customer profiles. Then there is the possibility of behavioral influence through the use of AI. Just like Facebook can influence behavior and choices by tailoring news feeds and ads to users, they will be able to mold the user's VR experience with behavioral cues and advertisements (both subtle and integrated).
Think about the effort they go through in order to track all of your digital movements now, and how valuable that is to them, and then consider how much more fruitful their efforts would be if you literally wore a headset that allowed them to monitor and influence your every perception in real time.
Yeah, they care about tracking people so much that they supply JS code for non-technical users to put on their websites, and provide an ad platform which is vastly confusing to encourage this behaviour \s.
Out of all companies that could own such a world, Facebook is the one that I'm most worried about.
Not a big difference in my book, humans are what we are. But with their emphasis on real name public face-book as their core business I suspect it could be.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point touched was very very narrow: Facebook very likely doesn't invest in Oculus for the sake of getting facebook accounts. I'd probably argue that it's not even for the sake of getting more info about the users, though I haven't yet. But I definitely didn't say anything like "they can kill your hardware device if you give up your account".
I did criticise tribalism, polarisation and automatically assuming that a discussion has exactly two sides. Hint hint.
> 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.
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.
Because they want to build an integrated services and hardware ecosystem just like Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
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.
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.
The content inside a room would be. But it would costa shittonne in GPU time to do that reliably, so it would cost a boatload.
Their information collection is a legitimate concern precisely because they have both the incentives (profiling and advertisement) and legal basis to collect it.
It's "easy" for a competent software engineer, yes, not a random person. But I assume that's most of the people on HN.
> Environmental, Dimensions and Movement Data: We collect information about your environment, physical movements and dimensions when you use an XR device.
> We use information we collect when you use Oculus Products for the purposes described in the Facebook Data Policy under "How do we use this information?", including to provide, personalise and improve the Facebook Products (including seamless integration between the Facebook Products); to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads)
https://www.oculus.com/legal/privacy-policy/
It's right there in black and white, they measure the dimensions of the participant and the environment, link it to a Facebook account, and use it to target ads.
Do you know why those clauses are in the legal agreement? its because otherwise they can't make the slam cameras work. Which means you need light houses.
Also when you submit a bug, I'm pretty sure it uploads the state of the SLAM map, which would be impossible if they didn't have the legal cover.
Now thats not to say that if they had the tech they _would_ use those bits of information. However they don't because they really don't have the tech yet.
Firstly the features that the oculus extracts from the SLAM cameras really arn't great for room mapping. Well, the cameras are fine, the feature extractor isn't. it works short term, but not for long term, or dense reconstruction.
Secondly, streaming 4x slam cameras at 60hz isn't trivial in a lab, let alone on with a battery on wifi on a generic internet connection.
Thirdly, facebook dont have anywhere near enough GPUs do the required classification/mesh generation/segmentation etc.
Finally there isn't a RGB camera.
This is relocalisation. Two things to note here
1) Facebook don't have enough GPUs to do this properly at scale.
2) For that kind of thing to work it needs either a GPS prior, or much more robust SLAM. the oculus isft doesn't have enough CPU/GPU to make robust multi-room maps (with big occlusions that is)
> This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account:
Its far more mundane than that. Its all about branding. The "brand" is all about "One facebook" or someshit so they want everyone to be interoperable. Thats why messenger and instgram are now able to communicate. I assume whatsapp will be added to that as well.
You're assumption is that facebook are a coherent force for evil. They really aren't that well organised. They are a collection of highly paid, naive tech people. Surrounded by some people with experience.
Google Home is people's own decision within their own home.
You mean microphones.
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!....
How exactly, I'll leave that for the experts.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
People will obviously get their physical needs met in the real world but much of the emotional stuff can move into their realms. If you get people hooked on this, who cares what happens in the real world if you can control their perception of things.
Similarly, only a small percentage of Google/Facebook's effort go towards ads. Most of it goes toward building products, languages, tools, and more.
It isn't OK just because they don't care. It's criminal.
correct. Everything is a stepping stone towards AR. In their view VR is limited, where as AR is killer platform that will let them run their own platform, with users finally paying directly for services.
> Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard.
Facebook realised a long time ago that they are reliant on either apple or google's platform. this means two things: They are vulnerable to any policy change on those platforms AND they are not getting a cut of the profit from the hardware sales and apps store.
> that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems
Facebook are dumping _billions_ into developing AR. not millions, actual billions. Mapping, dense reconstruction, semantic scene understanding, actual fucking holograms. All of these are nowhere near solved, and facebook are gambling big that they can not only solve these, but fit them into a set of glasses that are practical.
> If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
If its such a risk with such a tiny reward why do sony, microsoft & nintendo still bother making consoles?
> Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
The problem with all of this discourse is that it misses the fundamental argument thats at the heart of VR and later AR: privacy. It doesn't matter if facebook fails, the problems still exist.
AR is a fundamental threat to privacy regardless of who makes it. For AR to work you need always on hyper accurate location service.
They will also need always on cameras. They will have detection, segmentation and reconstruction systems that have to be capable of understanding the context of a street, shop, work and front room.
Even if we ignore the AI bit, the threat of an omni-recording head mounted camera is massive. (all password are recorded, every sound, every person you meed.)
finally 6dof centimetre accurate glocal positioning, with facial recognition, you basically have a system that can locate any face within 50m of a wearer of one of these glasses.
In conclusion: stop using facebook as a foil, and start to actually interrogate the technology.
I have a government ID with my address on it, and I give out my address online to 3rd parties all the time because I understand I have to give up that private information if I am to expect packages to arrive at my door.
Similarly, AR would be a significant piece of tech that can offer a user a lot of functionality. As much as I am also sad to see privacy take another hit, I dont see what the alternative is. We need to be able to consolidate the processing of all the information necessary to make AR functional.
Always on cameras on everyone would also make you very safe in the streets. Which is necessary if we continue moving the country in a direction where there are few legal means for you to protect yourself
VR is incredible, I'm all-in on this being the right time for it (after many failed attempts in the last few decades), and I think it could really blow up now, but we really need to help alternate brands come up before FB fully owns VR in the way Google owns the web.
I don't mind having an account with Facebook. I already have an Oculus account, and I add "Oculus friends" there, so I assume Facebook can get all my data from there, anyway (including my real name, as I added my credit card to be able to buy games).
But I find I mind having to befriend my gaming friends on Facebook, as I may share different content there.
In fact, if Facebook wants to become the ultimate social network, shouldn't they somehow offer better tools to manage different social circles? (Work, Family, Gaming, Sports, Politics...).
I don't think their play is to get my Oculus data to make better targeted ads. They already have that data.
What I could imagine is that the future of social networking will be in VR worlds, and since they want to dominate social networking, that's their power grab (they also work on a virtual world for that, Horizons).
But it seems to me their "friendship management tools" are not up to the task yet. I've never digged deeply into their controls, but it shouldn't be complicated.
It's not a new concept, either - weren't there "circles" in some network (Google+?). But it didn't work out. So instead of forcing this VR merge, perhaps they should focus on solving the circles problem first?
Their play is getting people to strap screens to their heads since it pretty much guarantees a captive audience.
It's a neat solution to the multi-device problem (i.e. When I serve an ad to this device, is this a new user or the same one?)
Also, I get the view that Oculus is just a video game console -- but I don't think that's how Zuck views it
My impression is that he thinks Oculus/VR will eventually surpass 2d interfaces. So, if they can get away with linking all of their ad targeting information now, in the early stages, then it won't seem weird if they do it later.
To be fair to FB, this is exactly what they're doing with integrating IG and FB messaging. It's just that no one is really complaining about that.
Doing this in the middle of an anti-trust investigation seems ... bold, but it is consistent with their financial incentives.
I am really not convinced people will be willing to put anything on their face for extra (en masse). Not unless its no more than existing glasses, and you don't look dumb in it. I am not sure this is a technical feat achievable in zucks lifetime
To make their graph more legible. Basically, seeing like a state but for corporations.
... which is really just the tip of the iceberg. http://www.stallman.org/facebook.html
Next non-oculus standalone headset has my money.
I know Intellectual Property and Copyright lawsuits aren't the same as Patent lawsuits, but when you're arguing about human interfaces they might as well be.
It's one thing if they just required you to make a login, but it sounds like you cant "just make a login". You have to give them your name, there's a good chance you'll get banned if you name is unusual or if you don't immediately make "friends", etc, etc.
Germany has already said that this is not OK, so I expect this to happen pretty quickly.
One morning you can get a notification that your FB account is blocked "due to suspicious" activity (apparently, no activity is suspicious activity too :) ). Unless you send a picture of government issued ID, that they "promise" to delete in 30 days. Thanks, but no, thanks.
Fortunately, for me it was good thing. No more pointless lurking, drama and being depressed by everyone else's perfectly portrayed lives.
So no more Facebook, no more Instagram, don't currently use Whatsapp and will keep it that way.
Facebook forces the use of its social network, and you can’t create an email without a profile. If you are inactive you can get banned.
Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of folks who abandoned Facebook without deleting their accounts, I haven’t heard of any of them getting banned.
But yes, it's unfortunate that Facebook is killing them this way. The good news is that everyone makes a VR headset now, and people are writing VR games, so it will probably be A Thing even without Oculus involved. Innovator's dilemma and all that.
https://enterprise.vive.com/us/product/focus-plus/
Arguably their reasons seem sound because how can they compete against Facebook in the consumer market with such a subsidized headset? Facebook is betting on being able to monetize your FB account and VR usage in a way that HTC can't with just hardware sales and software sales. Given that Quest requires a facebook account, it makes it a non-starter for enterprise/business use cases.
Oh wait, stand-alone. I don’t know about that part. Google discontinued Daydream so that’s out too.
Facebook is poised to crush the rest of the industry. They have the cash, talent, distribution channel and brand to do it.
Innovator's dilemma happens when 1) a low-priced, low-feature startup takes on higher-priced incumbent. High priced incumbent ignores low-priced startup. No one can go lower than FB on pricing
2) Fear of cannibalizations (EV eating Gas-guzzlers for GM, BMW). FB has always let Insta, WhatsApp and Oculus to run like startups with plenty of freedom. Oculus is not a threat to core FB, but an enhancer.
Bottomline, time to load up on FB stocks
He is now offering a bounty for the hacking of the quest 2.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/palmer-lucky-offers-5000-bou...
There’s a large incentive for, and a community around “hyping” things. So when they say “You’ll _never_ need a Facebook account” the outlets run with it, and the comments applaud it.
Similar things with the Cyberpunk 2077 “we will have never have micro transactions” statement. People believe what they want to hear in these communities. And it makes their emotional reactions very easy to manipulate.
I'd never have thought I'd need to create a Facebook account to use Oculus. At least I know what one brand I won't waste time looking into.
Someone I know had that happen and they're returning it to the retailer.
Facebook has no room for freeloaders.
Without proof, I'm going to assume it's not true.
If you think that’s an extraordinary claim, well, that’s the kind of behavior international users of American SNS is usually forced to go by. Since 5-10 years ago Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc all started banning people by flagged content counts and their agenda based algorithms with “violated community guidelines” types of phraseology instead of citing any particular offenses picked up or verified by human moderators.
https://old.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/japo1j/faceboo...
In this case the public notoriety of the post led to a resolution for this user, but many more are SOL. JP Twitter has a lot of posts about it.
I really really hope an alternative arises.
I even have an FB, but I don't want to give them anymore of my personal information. God knows what Oculus is collecting
I would love motion controls without actually wearing a headset.
Let me know if there's anything like this for pc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
(I was named as a defendant on that lawsuit)
Facebook not having a track record of suing jailbreakers might have something to do with facebook hardly having much history of making anything that would warrant jailbreaking.
Considering their revenue model, its not a surprise. But that sort of means that they also better believe they can build tech that is better than their competitors who wont have this drawback.
I’m ultimately not that upset, the Rift S is good for the price and was my first HMD. I’ll take my money elsewhere when it’s time to upgrade, but I think I’ll be happy with this for a while yet as pretty much all I play is beatsaber lol
It's like saying that people who like the color yellow are unlikely to like chocolate.
I've used Facebook a lot in the past, but through actions like this I find I'm already using my FB account like I do LinkedIn - a utility I have to use but barely use.
There is nothing stopping you have a "real name" account for oculus. You don't need to use that account for anything else.
and no, they won't ban you. They'll only do that if you are stupid enough to pay with a credit card with a different name. because that's a strong signal for fraud.
And again, if you're using a credit card they know your legal name and a boat load of other details.
You can, because thats what I do.
For its price point it is pretty dope
1) You can still use Valve Index controllers with the Quest
2) You can do PC VR with the Quest 2 via a USB 3.0 cable
3) You can do wireless PC VR using wifi AC using your home router and Virtual Desktop
4) You have a higher resolution headset panel than the Vive, when using it with PC VR.
However, for the tethered route, I just pre-ordered an HP Reverb G2.
https://i.redd.it/r6idh33kitp51.png
I think facebook is going to own standalone headsets for a while.
Well...money. They've got all the user data. Probably did a cost analysis and found that enough people would rather put up with FB than give up on VR games.
So I'll pretentiously ask it here:
Has the entirety of the Facebook Oculus shit changed anybody's view of Carmack? Without saying much more... it definitely has mine.
I know some principled, driven, and wonderful people who work for Facebook.
While I despise Facebook as a company, that doesn't reflect negatively on said people, at least insofar as they do not work on the kinds of things that I dislike Facebook for.
I would however hold them to account and openly criticize them if they did start working on such things. And I can and do criticize them when they spin apologia for Facebook as a company.
Why do you draw that distinction? Do you believe it's possible to work for Facebook without at least indirectly benefiting the company as a whole?
No, probably not. But I still draw that distinction.
I'm not a strict consequentialist. I think that people's intents matter and that their inner lives have moral significance.
So, for me, that outcome (Facebook benefiting) is only one factor in the moral calculus. In the case of the people I know (and likely John Carmack, though I don't know him), it isn't the dominating factor.
He still works directly with them?
I wonder if Michael Abrash is OK with Facebooks behaviour. He hasn't commented on it as far as i know and he is still leading their VR R&D.
Problem solved.
Do their terms of service allow crippling changes to their terms of service?
Google just tracks everyone everywhere across the internet.
They are only interesting hoovering up all of the data. Facebook plays with peoples emotions.
So in my chair Facebook > Google in asshattery.
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.
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.
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.
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.