But I paid for my Oculus Quest, and then I just paid for a game. I do not therefore want my eyeballs rented out.
Edit: I'd also much rather the Quest platform not become the cesspool that is the free-to-play ad-infested world the iOS AppStore has become. Please can we emulate the Nintendo model and encourage quality games you pay up front for.
It is vastly underpriced for the hardware it gives. Some is paid upfront and the rest is paid in data collection etc from facebook.
They have a "unconnected" version for sale for 800 USD and a service fee of 180 bucks. You can see how much you have not paid for in those prices when you go with the ad version.
If the Quest 2 was not associated with facebook I would have owned one a long time ago.
That pricing isn't for an "unconnected" version, that's for a business/enterprise version and yearly support. You can't use that figure and directly convert that into a value you place on your data or ad revenue.
Your point still stands, the Quest is heavily subsidized by user data on the premise of future ad revenue. This has been a given from the moment Facebook decided merge Oculus and FB acounts into one. I'm just correcting a false assumption that the $800 model is just "Quest -facebook", it's not.
I’d be upset if these ads were on the Oculus hardware that I paid for in the games I bought, but if it’s just going into freemium games then it’s business as usual in the ad space. I haven’t even heard of the “Blaston” game the article cites as one of the first games to adopt the ads.
I seem to be able to avoid ads quite a bit through tools & life style choices. I therefore ask this as someone whose personal opinion does not like the do anything for views to sell ads economy & avoids it as much as possible.
Imagine Billboards in the virtual worlds of your games for now. Image below if you want to see an example.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tXt80SaN80Qsg6MdMlC4fvbHcUA=...
Yes, facebook deserves blame. Yes, the game developers deserve blame. These can both be true at the same time.
Can't even use escapist reality to escape from ads now.
IMO that's worse. You spend more time in game than on the menu screen. Sadly this is likely a pandoras box we will not be able to close.
Valve has tried that a long time ago too and it wasn't successful. There's still some hope.
I'd like to invite you to turn that around. The freedom that we all get to exercise cuts both ways, it is not exclusively for companies to be active and consumers to passively, quietly accept things they dislike.
Citizens are free to complain about ads if they want to, and companies are free to to respond to market pressure by relying on more or less advertisement.
As a company, you might dislike negative consumer feedback, but you should just accept it as a tradeoff for making certain unpopular business decisions, or you should offer ad-free platforms and avoid the problem entirely.
Complaints are not inherently bad. They're just an effective consumer practice.
I agree, but I wasn't commenting at a societal level. I'm saying that at an individual level I see it as a waste of energy to get stressed out about something like ads in video games. There are so many ways to enjoy life, and stress is so bad for health.
They shouldn't be.
Also, cars? You get ads in your own car? Wow.
So I pose the question: What actions may we take in order to help ensure a future of non-implementation of "the user is the product" systems, with a specific focus on those actions that are most likely to be the most efficacious at accomplishing the stated goal in an expedient and lasting manner?
The same Facebook account that FB can at any time arbitrarily block and demand the owner properly ID themselves.
A situation that originally was deemed as “will never happen” when Occulus originally got acquired by FB.
At least there is also Valve to offer an alternative that’s more privacy minded. But this makes their hardware offerings more expensive by default, as the device prices can’t be subsidized by monetizing their users.
Valve exists but Valve's alternative is way pricier and requires a computer right? Facebook would be able to mass-produce these devices at a low cost in a completely different way it seems.
So since it is an android system under the hood it would be very possible to make VR apps that would work on all android systems. This would be so much better for the ecosystem as a whole.
Surely there are WebXR standards that would basically be webapps so they would be totally platform independent however this will surely not cut it for all applications.
Seeing how social media companies can manipulate politics and steer behaviour through ads imagine what happens in a VR only reality. This is a total nightmare scenario.
Would it be possible to try to create some sort of campaign to make people more aware about the bad effects of this lock in. Perhaps by finding a suitable chinese device that remains open and try to favour that over facebooks versions. Sort of how Huawei managed to more or less copy devices at a lower costs and get into the market that way?
Microsofts Mixed Reality standard deserves some attention as well obviously. Again this requires a PC and they seem to be a bit more pricier as well. These wouldn't require base stations as well.
The problem isn't technical, it's monetary. Facebook pours out tons of money to kickstart developers and get games out which is why they have a monopoly. There are few technical hurdles in the way of making Oculus games work on other headsets.
Well, the only "new" headset is the HP Reverb G2 which is indeed in the premium segment. But if you consider the used market, Samsung Odyssey+ is an incredible value option.
I hope Microsoft aren't completely sitting on their asses, they have everything they need to enter the standalone market and provide an alternative to Facebook. They have the Qualcomm partnership, they already have a standalone AR hardware project, it really shouldn't be hard to offer Windows-for-headsets to partners like HP…
I think the problem with the PC ecosystem that it is difficult to find an open framework that covers all the different systems.
All in all I am quite impressed with the Microsoft effort. It doesn't seem to lock customers in. There seems to be a possibility to use them with Linux as well.
Also the Microsoft AR system seems quite well executed as well even though it is definitely to costly for mainstream adoption. This is probably by design though and will go down for sure due to economy of scale.
So there would be web technologies that covers most of the platforms, albeit at a performance cost. At the end of the day maybe this is all about which SDK that covers the most platform and is the best for the developers.