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Facebook’s efforts to bring advertising to the Oculus virtual reality platform it spent billions of dollars creating doesn’t seem like a great start.
The company announced last week that it was planning to roll out its first in-game ads inside the title “Blaston” from VR game developer Resolution Games, and a few days later the game studio shared that after hearing guilt-ridden users decided to drop the ad.
A tweet from Blaston’s account read: “After listening to players’ opinions, we’ve realized that Blaston is not the best for this type of ad testing.” Therefore, we are no longer planning to implement the test. We look forward to seeing you in the arena and hope you try the Crackdown update launched today! “
This potential ad rollout was especially noteworthy because the in-title ads were tested from a third-party developer. Facebook has bought quite a few VR studios in recent months and owns a few of the most popular Quest titles within its market, so the opportunity to roll out advertising with a third-party partner gave Facebook an opportunity to frame ad roll out as a way for other developers to open up their own monetization channels, rather than Facebook doing it.
Last week’s announcement still sparked a lot of critics in the virtual reality community who weren’t enthusiastic about Facebook’s broader struggles to balance advertising efforts with user privacy, but other users seem more annoyed at the prospect of ads being rolled out within a paid address they’ve already purchased. Blaston retails for $9.99 at the Oculus Store.
Update: Resolution Games has reached out to TechCrunch with a statement, touting the possibility of further ad testing on the road inside one of the developer’s free apps. “To be clear, we understand that Blaston is not the best for this type of ad test. As an alternative, we’re looking to see if this small, temporary test can be ported to our free game, Bait! sometime in the future.”
Resolution Games’ abandoning testing before it even began is an early setback for Facebook’s VR ad efforts that shows how skeptical Facebook’s most vocal Oculus users are. In a blog post last week, Facebook sought to address early concerns about user data that would be used to serve ads in virtual reality, specifically stating that conversations recorded by a headset microphone and photos analyzed by onboard tracking cameras would not be used. .
Facebook saw a huge backlash last year from VR enthusiasts when they shared that new headphone owners will need a Facebook account in order to activate their devices. While criticism mounted after the announcement, the company said the recently released $299 Quest 2 headset has already surpassed all of Facebook’s previous virtual reality devices combined.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.
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