This week in VR has been pretty explosive because of the announcement made by Facebook that will force VR people to have a Facebook account to use their VR headsets. I’ve read news, editorials, and also lots of memes about it, and I think you too. But as a developer, I also wondered what this new policy means for us developers, and also for people that pretend to be developers to sideload apps on the Quest. I so asked some questions on Twitter to some people from the social media corporate and Chris Pruett, Director of Content Ecosystem at Oculus, has been so kind as to answer them. Thanking him for the information, I explain to you some clarifications about what the new Facebook account policy means for developers and sideloaders!
New Facebook account policy
In case you were in vacations and you lost contact with VR this week, you may have lost the announcement of the new Facebook account policy for Oculus devices. I’ll lazily copy-paste it here, since I actually think that everyone has already read it, so it doesn’t need further comments:
Today, we’re announcing some important updates to how people log into Oculus devices, while still keeping their VR profile. Starting in October 2020:
– Everyone using an Oculus device for the first time will need to log in with a Facebook account.
– If you’re an existing user and already have an Oculus account, you’ll have the option to log in with Facebook and merge your Oculus and Facebook accounts.
– If you’re an existing user and choose not to merge your accounts, you can continue using your Oculus account for two years.
After January 1, 2023, we will end support for Oculus accounts. If you choose not to merge your accounts at that time, you can continue using your device, but full functionality will require a Facebook account.
You can read the full policy here and a summary of the FAQ here.
Anyway, these articles, and also the related news on the most popular VR magazines, mostly talk about what happens to standard users, that use their Quest to play or interact with other people on social media… what happens to devs instead?
The rules for the developers
There is a separate blog post for us developers, that highlights how we should behave under this new policy, that will take effect from October 20th, 2020 (you can find the full rules here). You will be able to develop for the Oculus Quest and sideload apps using these 3 possibilities:
- A Facebook account
- A Test User account
- An Oculus account (if you already have it)
Facebook account
If you login to your Quest with a Facebook account, you can use it at its full power. You can be a user and also a developer at the same time. You can buy games, friend new people, share content on social media, stream your gaming sessions, sideload apps, test VR experiences, etc… You can exploit all the features that Facebook is offering you.
A Facebook account is how Facebook envisions every people should use a VR headset, exploiting its existing social framework. If you merge your Oculus account with a Facebook account, or if you start a new Facebook account from scratch, you can use all the functionalities of your Oculus Quest, or any other future headset by Facebook. You can merge your Oculus and Facebook accounts from October, 20th 2020 and after that, you won’t be able to undo this operation and they will be permanently linked.
Test User account
The Test User account is meant to develop and test the VR experiences of your organization. It is not linked to your personal Facebook account: it is a new kind of account that basically can be used by companies to make people test their VR experiences. With a Test user account, you’re basically saying that you’re just a developer or a tester, and nothing more. To create a Test User account, you can follow the instructions written in this official blog post.
This means that development-wise, this account type will let you use completely your Quest, but as soon as you try to do something more, you’ll be blocked. You won’t be able to buy content from the store, you won’t be able to friend people outside your organization, you won’t be able to use the social features of the device, etc… You’re not an Oculus user, and so you can’t do anything that the users can do.
But as a developer, you can do everything you want with your experiences, and test them without limitations. This is very important because I thought this kind of accounts had some limitations in testing Oculus Platform features, but Chris Pruett clarified it has not. Developers will be able to test their apps as they wish.
Oculus account
You can still keep logging in with your Oculus account, but in this case, you’ll have growing limitations about what you can test. For instance, you won’t be able to test new, updated, or social features, and I think that the more you’ll go on, the more there will be features from the Oculus Platform SDK you won’t be able to use.
Furthermore, remember what Facebook says about Oculus accounts:
After January 1, 2023, we will end support for Oculus accounts. If you choose not to merge your accounts at that time, you can continue using your device, but full functionality will require a Facebook account
This means that anyway in 2 years and a half, the support for Oculus account will stop, and this risks being a big trouble if you use your Quest in professional settings.
This option may seem the safest for the lazy people like me, but actually it is just good as a temporary solution while you decide to what kind of Facebook account you want to switch, because it is a too limiting solution.
Oculus For Business logins
Nothing changes now for organizations that are in the Oculus For Business program:
There is no change to the Oculus for Business enterprise platform, which allows company admins to use Workplace accounts to manage their VR deployments. Today, most developers and ISV (Independent Software Vendor) providers employ their own custom account and login systems that will not be impacted. There is also no impact on the shared devices model, where device access doesn’t require an account. We’re working to introduce Workplace login for individual device access in 2021, and will have more updates to share next year.
New devices will require a Facebook account
One of the reasons for which just keeping an Oculus account isn’t very profitable is the fact that all new devices from Facebook, including the rumored new Quest S, won’t work with an Oculus login. They will require you to use a new type of account, either a personal Facebook one, or a Test User account. There won’t be other options. So if as a developer, you want to keep developing experiences for your customers on new hardware, and you don’t want to stay in 2019 forever, you must use the new account system. Since in the VR business you must be at the cutting edge, sooner or later you’ll have to surrender and follow the new rules.
New content distribution system will require a Facebook account
Some weeks ago, Facebook announced that in 2021 it will release a new system to distribute content outside of the Oculus Store. We have very little details about it, but Chris Pruett clarified that it won’t be a separate store, but a way to distribute your apps to people via custom links. I can imagine that Oculus will let you upload your app to its servers and then it will give you a custom link that you can send to people so that they can access your app, download it and install it, even if it is not listed on the Oculus Store.
You won’t be able to use this system with an Oculus account, and not even a Test User account. You must use a Facebook login to use this new system. If you think about it, it is coherent: the Test User account is meant to test the products you and your organization are developing, and not to play games made by others. For that you must have a Facebook account
Sideloading and SideQuest
Let’s enter into the hybrid zone of sideloading, and especially of SideQuest, that has become an amazing store for the Oculus Quest. Will you still be able to use it?
Regarding sideloading, that is using “adb” to install content from your PC, the answer is yes. Sideloading is a core feature of Android, and Facebook can’t remove it, so you will still be able to install all the apks that you or your dev friends are developing. This means that all the current SideQuest system, that is all based on adb, will keep working exactly as today.
But the answer to “How will SideQuest work in the future?” is a bit more complicated. It will depend on how SideQuest will implement the content distribution system in the next months. SideQuest expressed appreciation for the idea of a new content distribution system by Oculus, because it could make its life even easier: installing through adb is sometimes tricky, and it is even trickier requesting people to create an Organization account just to be able to use a store. The new distribution system would make things easier, but at the same time would force people to have a Facebook account, and I bet that the SideQuest community won’t appreciate it. So, everything will depend on how SideQuest evolves in the next months, but if I had to bet, I think they’ll find a way to make things work even without a Facebook account, at least in the beginning. Or at least they will leave developers the freedom to choose how they want to share their content. I’m personally not much worried about this now.
UPDATE: A Spokesperson from SideQuest commented on this post this way:
We don’t think this announcement really affects us or our users apart from the upstream impact that everyone may need a Facebook account to use the device soon. As regards developers we don’t think much changes based on how they already build today. Test users don’t seem to have been impacted by this update at all.
As a developer, what should you do now?
There is never a right answer that fits all the situations that people may have, so I’m telling you what I’m personally going to do. Before the end of the year, I’ll merge my Oculus and Facebook account. I’m not sure I’ll use my current personal account through which I share memes with my friends, most probably I’ll create a new one with a more professional image, name, friends, and profile… something dedicated only to my VR life.
I personally don’t like at all this decision by Facebook, I don’t like the idea of a personal Fb account of mine merging with my professional Oculus one, I don’t like the fact that my eye-tracking data will be used to provide me relevant ads… I don’t even like what Palmer Lucky shared, that is that Facebook promised him that people would have never been forced to use a Facebook account to use Oculus devices. “A man is worth his word” and this rule also applies to companies. I hate who breaks his promises.
But at the same time, Facebook has made sure that for my working life it will be impossible not having a Facebook account. As a consultant, I must buy the new Oculus devices, and so I need a Facebook login. As a blogger, I need to test new games that game studios send me, and so I need to buy content from the Oculus Store, so I need it. As someone that organizes virtual events for VRrOOm (as the concert for Jean Michel Jarre), I need to explore Facebook Horizon, that will require a Facebook login. If I want to publish an app on the Oculus Store, I’ll need a Facebook identity. There’s no way to keep using the Oculus login or the Test User account unless I want to change my job and start frying potatoes at McDonald’s. Someone says that I could change VR headset, but I’m not a user, I’m a VR professional, and I can’t ignore the biggest VR platform out there.
I think that all VR developers will follow the same route: most of us use the Quest as a hybrid device, to play games and develop experiences, and we need a Facebook account to keep this behavior. Test User accounts will be good when for multiplayer projects of my agency we’ll need some people to make tests with us, and so we will hand them a headset with a Test User account to help us in testing our applications.
But I don’t see much uses for it unless you just want to develop applications that you only distribute via SideQuest. If you bypass all the Oculus ecosystem, and you just use Unity and SideQuest, then probably you can live out of a Test Account. We are not forced to switch to a Facebook account, but if we don’t do that, the possibilities will be so limited that in the end, most developers will do the switch, with a personal or a fake Facebook account. Also because I personally believe that in the remote case that all people will only live through SideQuest from now on, Facebook will find a way to limit it not technically (it is pretty hard), but legally, by declaring it as “unfair use” in an updated TOS, forcing again all people to switch to a Facebook account.
After the initial meme-ing, turmoil, and backlash from the community, waters will get calm again and almost all developers will reluctantly log in via Facebook on their Quest. We all knew that this day was going to come from when Facebook started gaining a stronger control on Oculus, and I think we all were prepared for this. Not happy, but prepared.
What about you? What do you think about this new policy? Are you going to create a fake account to comply with it? Are you happy about it? Let me know in the comments here or on my social media channels!
(Header image by Tweakanalogy)