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Oculus social features now require a linked Facebook account

nalex66
MVP
MVP
Apparently, starting today, Oculus social features (friends list, parties, visiting people's Oculus Homes) will now require a linked Facebook account. This was already the case for some apps like Venues, and some features, like accessing your phone's camera roll in the Quest gallery. Going forward, new social features will demand a Facebook account, and now existing features will too.

Starting today, when you choose to log into
Facebook from the Oculus Platform, you’ll be able to access new social
features that make it easier for you to connect with other people,
including:

  • Chats, so you can message your Oculus friends in or out of the headset with quick responses to hop into games together
  • Join your friends
    in VR directly from any device with links that open to where your
    friends are within an app, and see the most popular destinations where
    people are playing in VR
  • User-created Events, so you can organize meetups or multiplayer games with friends
  • Share photos, videos, and livestreaming to Facebook, allowing you to share your favorite moments to Facebook Groups from VR
  • Parties that any of your Oculus friends can join (previously parties were only invite-only)
  • Messenger friends can easily join you in VR when you send them links to join you where you’re playing

As
these changes roll out and we make it easier for people to connect and
build communities in VR, we’ll ask people to log into Facebook from the
Oculus Platform to use both the new social features above, as well as
existing social features like joining parties, adding friends, and
visiting other people’s Homes. These features are already powered by
Facebook, since Oculus is part of the Facebook family of apps. And now
first-party social interactions on the Oculus Platform will be backed by
Facebook identity, allowing us to help keep people safer in VR as we
grow the social VR ecosystem.


Personally, I'm not excited to see this, but I guess it's not surprising. I've never had a FB account, and haven't been interested in creating one, but we'll see how it goes--the obvious answer is to create one just for Oculus-related activity and not populate it with a lot of personally identifying information.

DK2, CV1, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3.


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo
180 REPLIES 180

StreetPreacher
Adventurer
Is this some kind of JOKE?!?!

It turns out that I used a different email address when I first created an Oculus account to pre-order my launch era Oculus Rift... 

Now I can't use any of the Oculus social features because for some reason I just CAN NOT get the correct Oculus and Facebook accounts linked...  

I even tried making a new Facebook account using my Oculus account email, but of course Facebook wouldn't let me create a new 'fake' account...

So since I used a different email address when I bought my rift it seems like I'm just SOL on chatting with friends?

kevinw729
Honored Visionary
rlnulgrwij1n.png
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

kojack
MVP
MVP

So since I used a different email address when I bought my rift it seems like I'm just SOL on chatting with friends?


Couldn't you change the oculus email to match your more recent one?

Author: Oculus Monitor,  Auto Oculus Touch,  Forum Dark Mode, Phantom Touch Remover,  X-Plane Fixer
Hardware: Threadripper 1950x, MSI Gaming Trio 2080TI, Asrock X399 Taich
Headsets: Wrap 1200VR, DK1, DK2, CV1, Rift-S, GearVR, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Reverb G2

beleedad
Explorer
I liked this headset but this is a deal breaker for me. I will not be making a facebook account so I am locked out of social features? I used this feature to play with a close relative of mine, they dont have facebook either. I did not buy this "feature" when I bought my S.

Richooal
Consultant
There is no reason on Earth why you would need a social media account to use a VR Headset. They can both happily exist side by side with their own "friends" network. Facebook is still able to use both databases for it's revenue stream. It's simply a convenience for them to have you link your accounts. It gives you no benefit but gives them a massive correlation boost.

Imagine the next move ...... must link Instagram and Facebook accounts if you want to continue using your Instagram "friends" (or whatever they're called on Instagram)

They already have a huge flock of sheep, blindly following each other. People will complain, weakly, then sign up, because gaming and "being social" are more important short term goals for them.

Remember how Bill Gates wanted to see a desktop PC in every home? Pretty huge dream, right? No. Facebook's drive to have an identity account for every person, is bigger.
i5 6600k - GTX1060 - 8GB RAM - Rift CV1 + 3 Sensors - 1 minor problem
Dear Oculus, If it ain't broke, don't fix it, please.

I had been expecting Horizon to be the Facebook app, with people then choosing to use that and be happy with Facebook integration whilst doing so. I was looking forward to trying it out on that basis, and if it was fun, it would draw a lot of new users into Facebook naturally.

Integrating Facebook with everything social in VR is a marketing mistake, the users of VR and the users of Facebook don't have a sufficiently large overlap in their demographics in my opinion. Maybe that's why they're forcing it... to bridge that gap. But I don't think demographics can be manipulated like that. It always seems to be the other way round, developmental direction is influenced by demographics.

Pull people to your network, don't push.

RedRizla
Honored Visionary
The problem with all this is I have seen how toxic things can get in chat rooms and even with people you create clans with sometimes. The fact is you don't really know the people you meet online, so you normally have your friends in real life and just share a passion for a certain game with the people you meet online.

I used to clan up with people years ago and usually ended up leaving because what was fun at first could usually turn toxic later on. The good thing about this is you can just walk away from it when things get like this and you are just using an an alias (username), but it's a bit more difficult if you are sharing your details with people etc. If I share a passion for a game with people online now, I usually just join in with lots of different people and play with my username. That's how things should be because I don't want to be sharing any details about myself online with people I don't know.


Big PC, all the headsets, now using Quest 3

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

RedRizla said:

.....
If I share a passion for a game with people online now, I usually just join in with lots of different people and play with my username. That's how things should be, because I don't want to be sharing any details about myself online to people I don't know.



Very interest point as always.
I have been using Facebook and other social media from the start - but in a very specific way, no personal information where possible and focused on immersive entertainment community business and information sharing. When personal or politics appears I stop and move on. 

An example of the danger is that because of how I use my media involvement I use a real name, and not hide behind an avatar. It makes it simple and also it is a clear way to see trolls and abusers, because they will gravitate to personal attacks using this info. It is all this kind of behavior that will be opened up by the sharing of real "friends" information through this platform. I think it is a dangerous path, and the VR community needs to rally to address it.
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

nalex66
MVP
MVP

RedRizla said:

The problem with all this is I have seen how toxic things can get in chat rooms and even with people you create clans with sometimes. The fact is you don't really know the people you meet online, so you normally have your friends in real life and just share a passion for a certain game with the people you meet online.

I used to clan up with people years ago and usually ended up leaving because what was fun at first could usually turn toxic later on. The good thing about this is you can just walk away from it when things get like and you are just someone with an alias (username), but it's a bit more difficult if you are sharing your details with people etc. If I share a passion for a game with people online now, I usually just join in with lots of different people and play with my username. That's how things should be, because I don't want to be sharing any details about myself online to people I don't know.


Just to be clear, the FB account linking does not expose your real details or identity to Oculus friends. You still have an Oculus account, and that’s still what your Oculus friends see. Having someone on your Oculus friends list doesn’t give them access to your FB account or identity. 

DK2, CV1, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3.


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo