— Oculus (@oculus) August 18, 2020 From the time the new policy starts, new Oculus users will have to log into the Oculus software with a Facebook account. If you have a separate Oculus account already, you’ll be encouraged from now on to merge it with your Facebook account. And if you have a non-merged Oculus account? It’ll remain available to you until the beginning of 2023, and then the company will stop supporting it. So yeah, if you wanted to remain untangled from the likes of Facebook, it’s bad news day for you. As for why it’s making this change, it’s apparently an attempt to boost the social aspect of VR (an activity that, I’ll remind you, requires you to stand alone in a large, empty room with a very heavy blindfold on your face). According to the announcement: It also name-dropped Horizon, the shared VR space Facebook’s working on and plans to launch some time in the near future. The point of it is to reinvigorate Facebook interactions, so I should think they’d want people to have their Horizon accounts tied to their Facebook identities. The announcement also includes a stipulation that you can customize your settings to create a barrier that’ll keep your Oculus account fenced off from your Facebook account: Regardless, it seems like an eventuality that most Oculus fans were anticipating when Facebook came into the picture. Oculus is now fully a mechanism of the Facebook machine, rather than a separate entity all by itself. That particular piper’s payment has come due. This update will go into effect in October.
