WHEN FACEBOOK BOUGHT OCULUS in 2014, one of Oculus’s founders, Palmer Luckey, said you won’t need to log onto Facebook to use your headset, and it became a semi-autonomous brand of Facebook. In 2018 it became a division of Facebook Technologies. Now Facebook is to integrate all user account functions. So, you will need to sign up to Facebook to use Oculus Rift. There will be no more new Oculus accounts. Existing users can merge their Oculus and Facebook accounts, which will become obligatory at the end of 2022.
The move hasn’t been well received by users and developers, but where it will make a big difference is in overseas markets. Oculus has had to stop selling in Germany because the coupling of products and services violates European law on data protection. So if you hate Facebook enough to avoid it, you’ve just lost access to Oculus headsets .