In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, rebranded his company from Facebook, Inc. to Meta. This change was followed by a Connect 2021 event, at which he introduced the Metaverse — a three-dimensional virtual reality where humans could connect using the company’s Oculus Rift and Quest VR headsets.
Now, nearly three years later, the growth of Meta’s ecosystem continues. However, the idea of the Metaverse as a public service somewhat imploded. People at Meta shifted the project’s focus to business-oriented ideas, leading to further changes within the company and branding.
One of those changes relates to the Oculus brand, as the company now mandates all users with Oculus accounts to finally make the move to Meta. This isn’t the first time Meta, as a company, has done something like this, but it seems that the changes are for good this time. Those who fail to comply with the company’s request to convert their Oculus account to Meta by March 29th, 2024, risk losing the data associated with their Oculus accounts, including their software libraries, games, achievements, store credits, and everything else their accounts might contain.
In fact, Meta notified its users that the migration to the Meta account is mandatory back in October 2022, so this isn’t fresh news but a continuation of Meta’s efforts to unify all of its products under a single umbrella. It’s also a fair warning to Oculus users about the impending deletion of their data. It all started back in 2014, when Meta, operating as Facebook at the time, bought the company that developed and manufactured the Oculus headset, Oculus VR.
This caused discomfort for some Oculus users due to Facebook’s notorious data collection. However, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, guaranteed that users wouldn’t need to log into their Facebook account each time they wanted to use the Oculus Rift. Nevertheless, by 2016, the Oculus VR began to be largely marketed as “Oculus by Facebook,” indicating the company’s integration into Facebook. Two years later, the Oculus VR officially became a division of Facebook Technologies, LLC.
Soon after, the company announced that all users would be required to have a Facebook account to access Oculus products and services as a means of facilitating better integration with other Facebook services and promoting better Facebook multiplayer and social experiences. Naturally, the users didn’t like this because there was no clear way of opting out of information tracking, and many feared that the collected data would likely be used for targeted advertisement — which later turned out to be true.
In 2020, Facebook announced the formation of Facebook Reality Labs, a new entity that would encompass all of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality hardware and software, including Oculus. It also mandated that all Oculus Quest users have to use their Facebook accounts in order to use their headsets by January 1, 2023. That also didn’t go according to plan because people started reporting that merging their Oculus account with a newly created Facebook account had bricked their headsets.
Following Facebook’s rebranding, the company also announced that all Facebook hardware products would be marketed under the Meta name, promising a new login system that wouldn’t require a Facebook account. This time the company delivered upon its promise with the new account system that doesn’t connect to Facebook or any other Meta social media. The newly introduced system allows users to seamlessly migrate their Oculus account and data to a Meta account.
The entire process is streamlined, and you can easily migrate your data by simply visiting Meta’s website and signing up for a Meta account using the same email address associated with your Oculus account. This new account creation method would allow users to transfer their game data, store credits, and all other data associated with their Oculus account to their newly created Meta account. But that’s not all; users can still link their Meta account to their Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts, which, admittedly, might be appealing to some.
Additionally, as part of its efforts to distance itself from the Oculus brand, all Oculus social media accounts were renamed to Meta Quests, and Meta began to retroactively refer to its VR lineup as Quest devices.
Now, for the moment of truth — but in this case, the truth is somewhere in between. The mandated account conversion doesn’t really affect that many people, especially since Meta Quest’s platform reported 6.4 million monthly active users while also stating that it sold 20 million Quest headsets.
If we assume that the number of inactive users matches the number of active ones, this change would imply that some 6 million people might lose their data, including the digital purchases they made with the real money they earned in a non-virtual world. So, while this story tells a tale about Meta’s efforts to distance itself from the Oculus brand, it also signals that the concept of ownership doesn’t really apply to digital assets and that our property can easily be taken from us with a press of a button — the Delete button.