Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, is encouraging gamers to make sure their Facebook account is "in good standing" before they buy an Oculus Quest 2. The new headset makes a number of significant hardware improvements over its predecessor, but has also brought a major new issue thanks to Facebook's mandatory account integration. Many customers have complained that Facebook has locked them out of their headsets entirely due to problems with their accounts, leaving them with only expensive paperweights.
Oculus has long been a very prominent name in the burgeoning VR industry. Its recent advancement with the Oculus Quest, a totally self-sufficient headset that doesn't require external cameras or a PC, made VR more accessible for just about everyone. The Quest 2 comes with a lot of advances, including better resolution, higher controller battery life, and, most importantly, a lower price. After the success of the Quest, users had almost every reason to get excited for the Quest 2. But the prior announcement that Oculus was going to start forcing Facebook account integration in October caused widespread outrage and pushed enthusiasm for the new headset pretty low.
Following the release of the Quest 2, that rage seems very justified. Andrew Bosworth sought to quell some of the anger in a Facebook AMA published to Twitter by Benjamin Bega. He stated that the team was working hard to track and follow up on every single case of Facebook accounts rendering a Quest 2 useless, though he did claim that the amount of cases wasn't large. In the meantime, the only advice he offered was for people to make sure their Facebook accounts were "in good standing" before they bought the new headset, which is an awfully vague piece of advice that doesn't really help fans who have been locked out of headsets they've already bought. Bosworth then leaned hard into defending the account integration, arguing that the move allows Facebook to provide a better user experience and better data security. Facebook and data security are two concepts that famously don't go together very well, and, again, arguing in defense of the system that's rendered a $300 headset useless does nothing for the people who've already spent that much money on that useless headset.
Bosworth's promises that the team is working on the account issue are promising, but customers are going to need a lot more to go off of, and advising users to keep their accounts in good standing is pretty worthless. Many users created accounts just to play the Quest 2; those accounts had no time to achieve any standing, good or bad, before they were shut down. Bosworth claims in the video that "every single person in VR matters to us" but at this point Oculus and Facebook are going to have to prove that that's the case in a much more tangible way.
A brand new VR headset is a big investment, and players have the right to know that they'll actually be able to use it before they buy. Facebook is sticking to its guns over a decision that led Oculus customers to waste hundreds of dollars, and any and all anger that's directed at the tech giant is fully warranted. The Quest 2 is by all accounts an excellent headset, and there are some excellent games lined up for it. But until Facebook gets its act together, buying an Oculus Quest 2 is an awfully risky proposition, with or without good standing.
Source: Benjamin Bega